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THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



VILLA RUBEIN and Other Stories 
THE ISLAND PHARISEES 
THE MAN OP PROPERTY 
THE COUNTRY HOUSE 
FRATERNITY 
THE PATRICIAN 



A COMMENTARY 
A MOTLEY 



PLAYS 



MOODS, SONGS, and DOGGERELS 



THE 
INN OF TRANQUILLITY 

STUDIES AND ESSAYS 



BY 

JOHN GALSWORTHY 



' Je vous dirai que I'exces est toujours un mal." 

— Anatole France. 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1912 



Copyright, 1912, by 
Charles Scribner's Sons 

Published October, 1912 




^ 



gci.A3:e.so3i 



TO 
JOHN WALLER HILLS 



For permission to reprint these Studies the Author's 
thanks are due to the Editors of the Fortnightly Review, 
Scribner's Magazine, English Review, Atlantic Monthly, 
Century Magazine, Nation, Eye-Witness, and Daily News. 



CONTENTS 
CONCERNING LIFE 



PAGE 



THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY 3 

QUALITY 14 

MAGPIE OVER THE HILL 26 

SHEEP-SHEARING 33 

EVOLUTION 40 

RIDING IN MIST 47 

THE PROCESSION 54 

A CHRISTIAN 61 

WIND IN THE ROCKS 70 

MY DISTANT RELATIVE 77 

THE BLACK GODMOTHER 89 

THE GRAND JURY 97 

GONE 113 

THRESHING 120 

THAT OLD-TIME PLACE 127 

ix 



X CONTENTS 

PAQB 

ROMANCE — THREE GLEAMS 132 

MEMORIES . 139 

FELICITY 163 

CONCERNING LETTERS 

A novelist's allegory 171 

some platitudes concerning drama . . 189 

meditation on finality 203 

wanted — schooling 212 

on our dislike of things as they are . 220 

the windlestraw 226 

about censorship 236 

vague thoughts on art 254 



CONCERNING LIFE 



THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY 

UNDER a burning blue sky, among the pine- 
trees and junipers, the cypresses and oHves 
of that Odyssean coast, we came one afternoon 
on a pink house bearing the legend: "Osteria di 
Tranquillita"; and, partly because of the name, 
and partly because we did not expect to find a 
house at all in those goat-haunted groves above 
the waves, we tarried for contemplation. To the 
famihar simpHcity of that Italian building there 
were not lacking signs of a certain spiritual 
change, for out of the olive-grove which grew to 
its very doors a skittle-alley had been formed, 
and two baby cypress-trees were cut into the 
effigies of a cock and hen. The song of a gramo- 
phone, too, was breaking forth into the air, as 
it were the presiding voice of a high and cos- 
mopohtan mind. And, lost in admiration, we 
became conscious of the odour of a full-flavoured 
cigar. Yes — in the skittle-alley a gentleman was 
standing who wore a bowler hat, a bright brown 
suit, pink tie, and very yellow boots. His head 
was round, his cheeks fat and well-coloured, his 

3 



CONCERNING LIFE 

lips red and full under a black moustache, and 
he was regarding us through ver}^ thick and half- 
closed eyehds. 

Perceiving him to be the proprietor of the high 
and cosmopoHtan mind, we accosted him. 

"Good-day!" he replied: "I spik English. 
Been in Amurrica — ^yes." 

"You have a lovely place here." 

Sweeping a glance over the skittle-alley, he sent 
fort-h a long puff of smoke; then, turning to my 
companion (of the politer sex) with the air of one 
who has made himself perfect master of a foreign 
tongue, he smiled, and spoke. 

"Too— quiet!" 

"Precisely; the name of your inn, perhaps, sug- 
gests " 

" I change all that — soon I call it Anglo-Ameri- 
can hotel." 

"Ah! yes; you are very up-to-date already." 

He closed one eye and smiled. 

Having passed a few more compliments, we 
saluted and walked on; and, coming presently to 
the edge of the cliff, lay down on the thyme and 
the crumbled leaf-dust. All the small singing 
birds had long been shot and eaten; there came 
to us no sound but that of the waves swimming 
in on a gentle south wind. The wanton creatures 

4 



THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY 

seemed stretching out white arms to the land, 
flying desperately from a sea of such stupendous 
serenity; and over their bare shoulders their hair 
floated back, pale in the sunshine. If the air was 
void of sound, it was full of scent — that delicious 
and enHvening perfume of mingled gum, and 
herbs, and sweet wood being burned somewhere 
a long way off; and a silky, golden warmth slanted 
on to us through the ohves and umbrella pines. 
Large wine-red violets were growing near. On 
such a cliff might Theocritus have lain, spinning 
his songs; on that divine sea Odysseus should 
have passed. And we felt that presently the 
goat-god must put his head forth from behind 
a rock. 

It seemed a little queer that our friend in the 
bowler hat should move and breathe within one 
short flight of a cuckoo from this home of Pan. 
One could not but at first feelingly remember the 
old Boer sajdng: "0 God, what things man sees 
when he goes out without a gun!" But soon the 
infinite incongruity of this juxtaposition began to 
produce within one a curious eagerness, a sort of 
half-philosophical delight. It began to seem too 
good, almost too romantic, to be true. To think 
of the gramophone wedded to the thin sweet sing- 
ing of the olive leaves in the evening wind; to 

5 



CONCERNING LIFE 

remember the scent of his rank cigar marrying 
with this wild incense; to read that enchanted 
name, "Inn of Tranquillity/' and hear the bland 
and affable remark of the gentleman who owned 
it — such were, indeed, phenomena to stimulate 
souls to speculation. And all unconsciously one 
began to justify them by thoughts of the other 
incongruities of existence — the strange, the pas- 
sionate incongruities of youth and age, wealth and 
poverty, life and death; the wonderful odd bed- 
fellows of this world; all those lurid contrasts 
which haunt a man's spirit tHl sometimes he is 
ready to cry out: "Rather than Hve where such 
things can be, let me die!" 

Like a wild bird tracking through the air, one's 
meditation wandered on, foUowuig that trail of 
thought, till the chance encounter became spirit- 
ually luminous. That Italian gentleman of the 
world, with his bowler hat, his skittle-alley, his 
gramophone, who had planted himself down in 
this temple of wild harmony, was he not Progress 
itseK — ^the blind figure with the stomach full of 
new meats and the brain of raw notions? Was 
he not the very embodiment of the wonderful 
child, Civihsation, so possessed by a new toy each 
day that she has no time to master its use — 
naive creature lost amid her own discoveries! 

6 



THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY 

Was he not the very symbol of that which was 
making economists thin, thinkers pale, artists hag- 
gard, statesmen bald — the symbol of Indigestion 
Incarnate! Did he not, dehcious, gross, uncon- 
scious man, personify beneath his Americo-Italian 
polish all those rank and primitive instincts, whose 
satisfaction necessitated the million miseries of his 
fellows; all those thick rapacities which stir the 
hatred of the humane and thin-skinned ! And yet, 
one's meditation could not stop there — it was not 
convenient to the heart! 

A Httle above us, among the olive-trees, two 
blue-clothed peasants, man and woman, were 
gathering the fruit — from some such couple, no 
doubt, our friend in the bowler hat had sprung; 
more "virile" and adventurous than his brothers, 
he had not stayed in the home groves, but had 
gone forth to drink the waters of hustle and com- 
merce, and come back — what he was. And he, 
in turn, would beget children, and having made 
his pile out of his 'Anglo-American hotel' would 
place those children beyond the coarser influences 
of life, till they became, perhaps, even as our- 
selves, the salt of the earth, and despised him. 
And I thought: "I do not despise those peasants 
— far from it. I do not despise myself — no more 
than reason; why, then, despise my friend in the 

7 



CONCERNING LIFE 

bowler hat, who is, after all, but the necessary 
link between them and me?" I did not despise 
the olive-trees, the warm sun, the pine scent, all 
those material things which had made him so 
thick and strong; I did not despise the golden, 
tenuous imaginings which the trees and rocks and 
sea were starting in my own spirit. Why, then, 
despise the skittle-alley, the gramophone, those 
expressions of the spirit of my friend in the billy- 
cock hat? To despise them was ridiculous! 

And suddenly I was visited by a sensation only 
to be described as a sort of smiling certainty, 
emanating from, and, as it were, still tinghng 
within every nerve of myself, but yet vibrating 
harmoniously with the world around. It was as 
if I had suddenly seen what was the truth of things; 
not perhaps to anybody else, but at all events to 
me. And I felt at once tranquil and elated, as 
when something is met with which rouses and 
fascinates in a man all his faculties. 

"For," I thought, "if it is ridiculous in me to 
despise my friend — that perfect marvel of dis- 
harmony — it is ridiculous in me to despise any- 
thing. If he is a little bit of continuity, as per- 
fectly logical an expression of a necessary phase or 
mood of existence as I myself am, then, surely, 
there is nothing in all the world that is not a little 

8 



THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY 

bit of continuity, the expression of a little neces- 
sary mood. YeS;" I thought, "he and I, and 
those olive-trees, and this spider on my hand, and 
everything in the Universe which has an individual 
shape, are all fit expressions of the separate moods 
of a great underlying Mood or Principle, which 
must be perfectly adjusted, volving and revolving 
on itself. For if It did not volve and revolve on 
Itself, It would peter out at one end or the other, 
and the image of this petering out no man with 
his mental apparatus can conceive. Therefore, 
one must conclude It to be perfectly adjusted and 
everlasting. But if It is perfectly adjusted and 
everlasting, we are all little bits of continuity, and 
if we are aU Httle bits of continuity it is ridicu- 
lous for one of us to despise another. So," I 
thought, "I have now proved it from my friend 
in the billy-cock hat up to the Universe, and from 
the Universe down, back again to my friend." 

And I lay on my back and looked at the sky. 
It seemed friendly to my thought with its smile, 
and few white clouds, saffron-tinged like the 
plumes of a white duck in sunhght. "And yet," 
I wondered, "though my friend and I may be 
equally necessary, I am certainly irritated by him,* 
and shall as certainly continue to be irritated, 
not only by him; but by a thousand other men and 

9 



CONCERNING LIFE 

things. And as to the things that I love and ad- 
mire, am I to suppress these loves and admirations 
because I know them merely to be the necessary 
expressions of the moods of an underlying Prin- 
ciple that turns and turns on Itself? Does not 
this way nullity He?" But then I thought: "Not 
so; for you cannot believe in the great adjusted 
Mood or Principle without believmg in each Httle 
and individual part of It. And you are yourself 
a little individual part; therefore you must be- 
Heve in that little mdividual part which is you, 
with all its natural likings and dislikings, and, 
indeed, you cannot show your belief except by 
expression of those likings and dislikings. And 
so, with a Hght heart, you may go on being irri- 
tated with your friend in the bowler hat, you may 
go on loving those peasants and this sky and sea. 
But, since you have this theory of life, you may 
not despise any one or any thing, not even a skittle- 
alley, for they are all threaded to you, and to de- 
spise them would be to blaspheme against contin- 
uity, and to blaspheme against continuity would 
be to deny Eternity. Love you cannot help, and 
hate you cannot help; but contempt is — for you 
— the sovereign idiocy, the irrehgious fancy!" 

There was a bee weighing down a blossom of 
thyme close by, and underneath the stalk a very 

10 



THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY 

ugly little centipede. The wild bee, with his 
httle dark body and his busy bear's legs, was lovely 
to me, and the creepy centipede gave me shud- 
derings; but it was a pleasant thing to feel so sure 
that he, no less than the bee, was a little mood 
expressing himself out in harmony with Design — 
a tiny thread on the miraculous quilt. And I 
looked at him with a sudden zest and curiosity; 
it seemed to me that in the mystery of his queer 
little creepings I was enjoying the Supreme Mys- 
tery; and I thought: "If I knew all about that 
wriggling beast, then, indeed, I might despise him; 
but, truly, if I knew all about him I should know 
all about everything — Mystery would be gone, 
and I could not bear to live!" 

So I stirred him with my finger and he went 
away. 

"But how" — I thought — "about such as do 
not feel it ridiculous to despise; how about those 
whose temperaments and religions show them all 
things so plainly that they know they are right 
and others wrong? They must be in a bad way!" 
And for some seconds I felt sorry for them, and 
was discouraged. But then I thought: "Not 
at all — obviously not! For if they do not find 
it ridiculous to feel contempt, they are perfectly 
right to feel contempt, it being natural to them; 

11 



CONCERNING LIFE 

and you have no business to be sorry for them, 
for that iS; after all, only your euphemism for 
contempt. They are all right, being the expres- 
sions of contemptuous moods, having religions 
and so forth, suitable to these moods; and the 
religion of your mood would be Greek to them, 
and probably a matter for contempt. But this 
only makes it the more interesting. For though 
to you, for instance, it may seem impossible to 
worship Mystery with one lobe of the brain, and 
with the other to explain it, the thought that this 
may not seem impossible to others should not 
discourage you; it is but another little piece of 
that Mysteiy which makes life so wonderful and 
sweet." 

The sun, fallen now almost to the level of the 
cliff, was slanting upward on to the burnt-red 
pine boughs, which had taken to themselves a 
quaint resemblance to the great brown limbs of 
the wild men Titian drew in his pagan pictures, 
and down below us the sea-nymphs, still swim- 
ming to shore, seemed eager to embrace them in 
the enchanted groves. All was fused in that 
golden glow of the sun going down — sea and land 
gathered into one transcendent mood of light and 
colour, as if Mystery desired to bless us by show- 
ing how perfect was that worshipful adjustment, 

12 



THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY 

whose secret we could never know. And I said 
to myself: "None of those thoughts of yours are 
new, and in a vague way even you have thought 
them before; but all the same, they have given 
you some Httle feeling of tranquillity." 

And at that word of fear I rose and invited my 
companion to return toward the town. But as 
we stealthily crept by the "Osteria di Tranquil- 
lita," our friend in the bowler hat came out with 
a gun over his shoulder and waved his hand 
toward the Inn. 

"You come again in two week — ^I change all 
that ! And now," he added, " I go to shoot Httle 
bird or two," and he disappeared into the golden 
haze under the olive-trees. 

A minute later we heard his gun go off, and re- 
turned homeward with a prayer. 

1910. 



13 



QUALITY 

I KNEW him from the days of my extreme 
youth, because he made my father's boots; 
inhabiting with his elder brother two httle shops 
let into one, in a small by-street — now no more, 
but then most fashionably placed in the West End. 
That tenement had a certain quiet distinction; 
there was no sign upon its face that he made for 
any of the Royal Family — merely his own Ger- 
man name of Gessler Brothers; and in the win- 
dow a few pairs of boots. I remember that it 
always troubled me to^ account for those unvary- 
ing boots in the window, for he made only what 
was ordered, reaching nothing down, and it seemed 
so inconceivable that what he made could ever 
have failed to fit. Had he bought them to put 
there? That, too, seemed mconceivable. He 
would never have tolerated in his house leather 
on which he had not worked himself. Besides, 
they were too beautiful — the pair of pumps, so 
inexpressibly slim, the patent leathers with cloth 
tops, making water come into one's mouth, the tall 
brown riding boots with marvellous sooty glow, 

14 



~ . , QUALITY 

as if, though new, they had been worn a hundred 
years. Those pairs could only have been made 
by one who saw before him the Soul of Boot — so 
truly were they prototypes incarnating the very 
spirit of all foot-gear. These thoughts, of course, 
came to me later, though even when I was pro- 
moted to him, at the age of perhaps fourteen, 
some inkling haunted me of the dignity of himself 
and brother. For to make boots — such boots as 
he made — seemed to me then, and still seems to 
me, mysterious and wonderful. 

I remember well my shy remark, one day, while 
stretching out to him my youthful foot : 

"Isn't it awfully hard to do, Mr. Gessler?" 

And his answer, given with a sudden smile 
from out of the sardonic redness of his beard: 
"Id is an Ardt!" 

Hiriiself , he was a Httle as if made from leather, 
with his yellow crinkly face, and crinkly reddish 
hair and beard, and neat folds slanting down his 
cheeks to the corners of his mouth, and his gut- 
tural and one-toned voice;. for leather is a sardonic 
substance, and stiff and slow of purpose. And 
that was the character of his face, save that his 
eyes, which were grey-blue, had in them the sim- 
ple gravity of one secretly possessed by the Ideal. 
His elder brother was so very like him — though 

15 



CONCERNING LIFE 

watery, paler in every way, with a great industry 
— that sometimes in early days I was not quite 
sure of him until the interview was over. Then 
I knew that it was he, if the words, "I will ask 
my brudder," had not been spoken; and that, if 
they had, it was his elder brother. 

When one grew old and wild and ran up bills, 
one somehow never ran them up with Gessler 
Brothers. It would not have seemed becoming 
to go in there and stretch out one's foot to that 
blue iron-spectacled glance, owing him for more 
than — say — two pairs, just the comfortable re- 
assurance that one was still his client. 

For it was not possible to go to him very often 
■ — his boots lasted terribly, having something 
beyond the temporary — some, as it were, essence 
of boot stitched into them. 

One went in, not as into most shops, in the 
mood of: "Please serve me, and let me go!" but 
restfuUy, as one enters a church; and, sitting on 
the single wooden chair, waited — for there was 
never anybody there. Soon, over the top edge 
of that sort of well — rather dark, and smelling 
soothingly of leather — which formed the shop, 
there would be seen his face, or that of his elder 
brother, peering down. A guttural sound, and 
the tip-tap of bast slippers beating the narrow 

16 



QUALITY 

wooden stairs, and he would stand before one 
without coat; a Httle bent, in leather apron, with 
sleeves turned back, blinking — as if awakened 
from some dream of boots, or like an owl sur- 
prised in daylight and annoyed at this inter- 
ruption. 

And I would say: "How do you do, Mr. Gess- 
ler? Could you make me a pair of Russia leather 
boots?" 

Without a word he would leave me, retiring 
whence he came, or into the other portion of the 
shop, and I would continue to rest in the wooden 
chair, inhaling the incense of his trade. Soon he 
would come back, holding in his thin, veined hand 
a piece of gold-brown leather. With eyes fixed 
on it, he would remark: "What a beaudiful 
biece!" When I, too, had admired it, he would 
speak again. "When do you wand dem?" And 
I would answer: "Oh! As soon as you conve- 
niently can." And he would say: "To-morrow 
fordnighd?" Or if he were his elder brother: "I 
will ask my brudder!" 

Then I would murmur: "Thank you! Good- 
morning, Mr. Gessler." "Goot-morning!" he 
would reply, still looking at the leather in his 
hand. And as I moved to the door, I would hear 
the tip-tap of his bast slippers restoring him, up 

17 



CONCERNING LIFE 

the stairs, to his dream of boots. But if it were 
some new kind of foot-gear that he had not yet 
made me, then indeed he would observe ceremony 
— divesting me of my boot and holding it long 
in his hand, looking at it with eyes at once criti- 
cal and loving, as if recalling the glow with which 
he had created it, and rebuking the way in which 
one had disorganized this masterpiece. Then, 
placing my foot on a piece of paper, he would two 
or three times tickle the outer edges with a pen- 
cil and pass his nervous fingers over my toes, 
feeling himself into the heart of my requirements. 

I cannot forget that day on which I had oc- 
casion to say to him: "Mr. Gessler, that last pair 
of town walking-boots creaked, you know." 

He looked at me for a time without repljdng, 
as if expecting me to withdraw or qualify the 
statement, then said: 

"Id shouldn'd 'ave greaked." 

"It did, I'm afraid." 

"You goddem wed before dey found demselves?" 

"I don't think so." 

At that he lowered his eyes, as if hunting for 
memory of those boots, and I felt sorry I had 
mentioned this grave thing. 

"Zend dem back!" he said; "I will look at 
dem." 

18 



QUALITY 

A feeling of compassion for my creaking boots 
surged up in me, so well could I imagine the sor- 
rowful long curiosity of regard which he would 
bend on them. 

"Zome boods," he said slowly, "are bad from 
birdt. If I can do noding wid dem, I dake dem 
off your biU." 

Once (once only) I went absent-mindedly into 
his shop in a pair of boots bought in an emer- 
gency at some large firm's. He took my order 
without showing me any leather, and I could feel 
his eyes penetrating the inferior integument of 
my foot. At last he said : 

"Dose are nod my boods." 

The tone was not one of anger, nor of sorrow, 
not even of contempt, but there was in it some- 
thing quiet that froze the blood. He put his 
hand down and pressed a finger on the place 
where the left boot, endeavouring to be fashion- 
able, was not quite comfortable. 

"Id 'urds you dere," he said. "Dose big 
virms 'ave no self-respect. Drash!" And then, 
as if something had given way within him, he 
spoke long and bitterly. It was the only time 
I ever heard him discuss the conditions and hard- 
ships of his trade. 

"Dey get id all," he said, "dey get id by ad- 
19 



CONCERNING LIFE 

verdisement, nod by work. Dey dake it away 
from US; who lofe our boods. Id gomes to this 
— bresently I haf no work. Every year id gets 
less — ^you wiU see." And looking at his lined 
face I saw things I had never noticed before, bit- 
ter things and bitter struggle — and what a lot 
of grey hairs there seemed suddenly in his red 
beard ! 

As best I could, I explained the circumstances 
of the purchase of those ill-omened boots. But 
his face and voice made so deep impression that 
during the next few minutes I ordered many 
pairs. Nemesis fell! They lasted more terribly 
than ever. And I was not able conscientiously 
to go to him for nearly two years. 

When at last I went I was surprised to find that 
outside one of the two little windows of his shop 
another name was painted, also that of a boot- 
maker — making, of course, for the Royal Family. 
The old familiar boots, no longer in dignified 
isolation, were huddled in the single window. 
Inside, the now contracted well of the one little 
shop was more scented and darker than ever. 
And it was longer than usual, too, before a face 
peered down, and the tip-tap of the bast slippers 
began. At last he stood before me, and, gazing 
through those rusty iron spectacles, said: 

20 



QUALITY 

"Mr. —, isn'd it?" 

"Ah! Mr. Gessler," I stammered, "but your 
boots are really too good, you know! See, these 
are quite decent still!" And I stretched out to 
him my foot. He looked at it. 

"Yes," he said, "beople do nod wand good 
boods, id seems." 

To get away from his reproachful eyes and 
voice I hastily remarked: "What have you done 
to your shop?" 

He answered quietly: "Id was too exbensif. 
Do you wand some boods? " 

I ordered three pairs, though I had only wanted 
two, and quickly left. I had, I do not know quite 
what feeling of being part, in his mind, of a con- 
spiracy against him; or not perhaps so much 
against him as against his idea of boot. One 
does not, I suppose, care to feel like that; for it 
was again many months before my next visit to 
his shop, paid, I remember, with the feeling: "Oh! 
well, I can't leave the old boy — so here goes! 
Perhaps it'll be his elder brother!" 

For his elder brother, I knew, had not char- 
acter enough to reproach me, even dumbly. 

And, to my rehef, in the shop there did appear 
to be his elder brother, handling a piece of leather. 
■ "Well, Mr. Gessler," I said, "how are you?" 

21 



CONCERNING LIFE 

He came close, and peered at me. 

"I am breddy well," he said slowly "but my 
elder brudder is dead." 

And I saw that it was indeed himself — but 
how aged and wan! And never before had I 
heard him mention his brother. Much shocked, 
I murmured: "Oh! I am sorry!" 

"Yes," he answered, "he was a good man, he 
made a good bood; but he is dead." And he 
touched the top of his head, where the hair had 
suddenly gone as thin as it had been on that of 
his poor brother, to indicate, I suppose, the cause 
of death. "He could nod ged over losing de 
oder shop. Do you wand any boods?" And he 
held up the leather in his hand: "Id's a beaudi- 
ful biece." 

I ordered several pairs. It was very long be- 
fore they came — ^but they were better than ever. 
One simply could not wear them out. And soon 
after that I went abroad. 

It was over a year before I was again in Lon- 
don. And the first shop I went to was my old 
friend's. I had left a man of sixty, I came back 
to one of seventy-five, pinched and worn and 
tremulous, who genuinely, this time, did not at 
first know me. 

"Oh! Mr. Gessler," I said, sick at heart; "how 
22 



QUALITY 

splendid your boots are! See, IVe been wearing 
this pair nearly all the time IVe been abroad; 
and they're not half worn out, are they?" 

He looked long at my boots — a pair of Russia 
leather, and his face seemed to regain steadiness. 
Putting his hand on my instep, he said : 

" Do dey vid you here? I 'ad drouble wid dat 
bair, I remember." 

I assured him that they had fitted beautifully. 

"Do you wand any boods?" he said. "I can 
make dem quickly; id is a slack dime." 

I answered: "Please, please! I want boots all 
round — eveiy kind!" 

"I will make a vresh model. Your food must 
be bigger." And with utter slowness, he traced 
round my foot, and felt my toes, only once look- 
ing up to say: 

"Did I dell you my Drudder was dead?" 

To watch him was painful, so feeble had he 
grown ; I was glad to get away. 

I had given those boots up, when one evening 
they came. Opening the parcel, I set the four 
pairs out in a row. Then one by one I tried them 
on. There was no doubt about it. In shape and 
fit, in finish and quality of leather, they were the 
best he had ever made me. And in the mouth of 
one of the Town walking-boots I found his bill. 

23 



CONCERNING LIFE 

The amount was the same as usual, but it gave me 
quite a shock. He had never before sent it in till 
quarter day. I flew down-stairs, and wrote a 
cheque, and posted it at once with my own hand. 

A week later, passing the little street, I thought 
I would go in and tell him how splendidly the new 
boots fitted. But when I came to where his shop 
had been, his name was gone. Still there, in the 
window, were the shm pumps, the patent leathers 
with cloth tops, the sooty riding boots. 

I went in, very much disturbed. In the two 
little shops — again made into one — was a young 
man with an EngHsh face. 

"Mr. Gesslerin?" I said. 

He gave me a strange, ingratiating look. 

"No, sir," he said, "no. But we can attend 
to anything with pleasure. WeVe taken the shop 
over. You've seen our name, no doubt, next 
door. We make for some veiy good people." 

"Yes, yes," I said; "but Mr. Gessler?" 

"Oh!" he answered; "dead." 

"Dead! But I only received these boots from 
him last Wednesday week." 

"Ah!" he said; "a shockin' go. Poor old man 
starved 'imself." 

"Good God!" 

"Slow starvation, the doctor called it! You 

24 



QUALITY 

see he went to work in such a way! Would keep 
the shop on; wouldn't have a soul touch his boots 
except himself. When he got an order, it took 
him such a time. People won't wait. He lost 
everybody. And there he'd sit, goin' on and on 
— I will say that for him — not a man in London 
made a better boot ! But look at the competition ! 
He never advertised ! Would 'ave the best leather, 
too, and do it all 'imself . Well, there it is. What 
could you expect with his ideas?" 

"But starvation !" 

"That may be a bit flowery, as the sayin' is — 
but I know myself he was sittin' over his boots 
day and night, to the very last. You see I used 
to watch him. Never gave 'imself time to eat; 
never had a penny in the house. All went in rent 
and leather. How he lived so long I don't know. 
He regular let his fire go out. He was a character. 
But he made good boots." 

"Yes," I said, "he made good boots." 

And I turned and went out quickly, for I did 
not want that youth to know that I could hardly 
see. 

i9n. 



25 



MAGPIE OVER THE HILL 

I LAY often that summer on a slope of sand 
and coarse grass, close to the Cornish sea, try- 
ing to catch thoughts; and I was trying very hard 
when I saw them coming hand in hand. 

She was dressed in blue linen, and a little cloud 
of honey-coloured hair; her small face had serious 
eyes the colour of the chicory flowers she was hold- 
ing up to sniff at — a clean sober little maid, with 
a very touching upward look of trust. Her com- 
panion was a strong, active boy of perhaps four- 
teen, and he, too, was serious — his deep-set, black- 
lashed eyes looked down at her with a queer 
protective wonder, the while he explamed in a 
soft voice broken up between two ages, that exact 
process which bees adopt to draw honey out of 
flowers. Once or twice this hoarse but charm- 
ing voice became quite fervent, when she had 
evidently failed to follow; it was as if he would 
have been impatient, only he knew he must not, 
because she was a lady and younger than himself, 
and he loved her. 

They sat down just below my nook, and began 
26 



MAGPIE OVER THE HILL 

to count the petals of a chicory flower, and slowly 
she nestled in to him, and he put his arm romid 
her. Never did I see such sedate, sweet lovering, 
so trusting on her part, so guardianlike on his. 
They were like, in miniature — ^though more dewy, 
— those sober couples who have long Hved to- 
gether, yet whom one still catches looking at each 
other with confidential tenderness, and in whom, 
one feels, passion is atrophied from never having 
been in use. 

Long I sat watching them in their cool com- 
munion, half-embraced, talking a Httle, smiling 
a httle, never once kissing. They did not seem 
shy of that ; it was rather as if they were too much 
each other's to think of such a thing. And then 
her head shd lower and lower down his shoulder, 
and sleep buttoned the lids over those chicory- 
blue eyes. How careful he was, then, not to 
wake her, though I could see his arm was getting 
stiff ! He still sat, good as gold, holding her, till it 
began quite to hurt me to see his shoulder thus 
in chancery. But presently I saw him draw his 
arm away ever so carefully, lay her head down 
on the grass, and lean forward to stare at some- 
thing. Straight in front of them was a magpie, 
balancing itself on a stripped twig of thorn-tree. 
The agitating bird, painted of night and day, was 

27 



V 



CONCERNING LIFE 

making a queer noise and flirting one wing, as if 
trying to attract attention. Rising from the 
twig, it circled, vivid and stealthy, twice round 
the tree, and flew to another a dozen paces off. 
The boy rose; he looked at his little mate, looked 
at the bird, and began quietly to move toward 
it; but uttering again its queer call, the bird 
glided on to a third thorn-tree. The boy hesi- 
tated then — ^but once more the bird flew on, and 
suddenly dipped over the hill. I saw the boy 
break into a run; and getting up quickly, I ran 
too. 

When I reached the crest there was the black 
and white bird flying low into a dell, and there 
the boy, with hair streaming back, was rushing 
helter-skelter down the hill. He reached the bot- 
tom and vanished into the dell. I, too, ran down 
the hill. For all that I was prying and must not 
be seen by bird or boy, I crept warily in among 
the trees to the edge of a pool that could know 
but little sunhght, so thickly arched was it by 
-willows, birch-trees, and wild hazel. There, m 
a swing of boughs above the water, was perched 
no pied bird, but a young, dark-haired girl with 
dangling, bare, brown legs. And on the brink of 
the black water goldened with fallen leaves, the 
boy was crouching, gazing up at her with all his 



MAGPIE OVER THE HILL 

soul. She swung just out of reach and looked 
down at him across the pool. How old was she, 
with her brown limbs, and her gleaming, slanting 
eyes? Or was she only the spirit of the dell, this 
elf-thing swinging there, entwined with boughs 
and the dark water, and covered with a shift of 
wet birch leaves. So strange a face she had, wild, 
almost wicked, yet so tender; a face that I could 
not take my eyes from. Her bare toes just 
touched the pool, and flicked up drops of water 
that fell on the boy's face. 

From him all the sober steadfastness was gone; 
already he looked as wild as she, and his arms 
were stretched out trying to reach her feet. I 
wanted to cry to him: "Go back, boy, go back!" 
but could not; her elf eyes held me dumb — they 
looked so lost in their tender wildness. 

And then my heart stood still, for he had slipped 
and was struggling in deep water beneath her 
feet. What a gaze was that he was turning up 
to her — not frightened, but so longing, so des- 
perate; and hers — how triumphant, and how 
happy! 

And then he clutched her foot, and clung, and 
chmbed; and bending down, she drew him up to 
her, all wet, and clasped him in the swing of 
boughs. 

29 



CONCERNING LIFE 

I took a long breath then. An orange gleam 
of sunlight had flamed ui among the shadows 
and fell romid those two where they swung over 
the dark water, with lips close together and spirits 
lost in one another's, and in their eyes such drown- 
ing ecstasy! And then — they kissed! All round 
me pool, and leaves, and air seemed suddenly to 
swirl and melt — I could see nothing plain! . . . 
What time passed — I do not know — before their 
faces slowly again became visible! His face — 
the sober boy's — was turned away from her, and 
he was Hstening; for above the whispering of 
leaves a sound of weeping came from over the 
hill. It was to that he listened. 

And even as I looked he slid down from out of 
her arms, back into the pool, and began struggling 
to gain the edge. What grief and longing in her 
wild face then! But she did not wail. She did 
not try to pull him back; that elfish heart of dig- 
nity could reach out to what was coming, it could 
not drag at what was gone. Unmoving as the 
boughs and water, she watched him abandon her. 

Slowly the struggling boy gained land, and 
lay there, breathless. And still that sound of 
lonely weeping came from over the hill. 

Listening, but looking at those wild, mourning 
eyes that never moved from him, he lay. Once 

30 



MAGPIE OVER THE HILL 

he turned back toward the water, but fire had 
died witiiin him; his hands dropped, nerveless — 
his young face was all bewilderment. 

And the quiet darkness of the pool waited, and 
the trees, and those lost eyes of hers, and my 
heart. And ever from over the hill came the 
little fair maiden's lonely weeping. 

Then, slowly dragging his feet, stumbHng, half- 
blinded, turning and turning to look back, the 
boy groped his way out through the trees toward 
that sound; and, as he went, that dark spirit-elf, 
abandoned, clasping her own lithe body with her 
arms, never moved her gaze from him. 

I, too, crept away, and when I was safe outside 
in the pale evening sunUght, peered back into the 
dell. There under the dark trees she was no 
longer, but round and round that cage of passion, 
fluttering and wailing through the leaves, over the 
black water, was the magpie, flighting on its twi- 
light wuigs. 

I turned and ran and ran till I came over the 
hill and saw the boy and the httle fair, sober 
maiden sitting together once more on the open 
slope, under the high blue heaven. She was 
nestling her tear-stained face against his shoulder 
and speaking already of indifferent things. And 
he — he was holding her with his arm and watch- 

31 



CONCERNING LIFE 

ing over her with eyes that seemed to see some- 
thing else. 

And so I lay, hearing their sober talk and gaz- 
ing at their sober little figures, till I awoke and 
knew I had dreamed aU that little allegory of 
sacred and profane love, and from it had returned 
to reason, knowing no more than ever which was 
which. 

1912. '-^ 



32 



SHEEP-SHEARING 

FROM early morning there had been bleating 
of sheep in the yard, so that one knew the 
creatures were being sheared, and toward evening 
I went along to see. Thirty or forty naked-look- 
ing ghosts of sheep were penned against the barn, 
and perhaps a dozen still inhabiting their coats. 
Into the wool of one of these bulky ewes the far- 
mer's small, yellow-haired daughter was twisting 
her fist, hustling it toward Fate; though pulled 
almost off her feet by the frightened, stubborn 
creature, she never let go, till, with a despairing 
cough, the ewe had passed over the threshold 
and was fast in the hands of a shearer. At the 
far end of the barn, close by the doors, I stood a 
minute or two before shifting up to watch the 
shearing. Into that dim, beautiful home of age, 
with its great rafters and mellow stone archways, 
the June sunlight shone through loopholes and 
chinks, in thin glamour, powdering with its very 
strangeness the dark cathedraled air, where, high 
up, clung a fog of old grey cobwebs so thick as 
ever were the stalactites of a huge cave. At 

33 



CONCERNING LIFE 

this end the scent of sheep and wool and men had 
not yet routed that home essence of the barn, 
Hke the savour of acorns and withering beech 
leaves. 

They were shearing by hand this year, nine of 
them, counting the postman, who, though farm- 
bred, "did'n putt much to the shearinV' but had 
come to round the sheep up and give general aid. 

Sitting on the creatures, or with a leg firmly 
crooked over their heads, each shearer, even the 
two boys, had an air of going at it in his own way. 
In their white canvas shearing suits they worked 
very steadily, almost in silence, as if drowsed by 
the "click-clip, click-clip" of the shears. And 
the sheep, but for an occasional wriggle of legs 
or head, lay quiet enough, having an inborn sense 
perhaps of the fitness of things, even when, once 
in a way, they lost more than wool; glad too, 
mayhap, to be rid of their matted vestments. 
From time to time the little damsel offered each 
shearer a jug and glass, but no man drank till 
he had finished his sheep; then he would get up, 
stretch his cramped muscles, drink deep, and 
almost instantly sit down again on a fresh beast. 
And always there was the buzz of flies swarming 
in the sunKght of the open doorway, the dry 
rustle of the pollarded lime-trees in the sharp wind 

34 



SHEEP-SHEARING 

outside, the bleating of some released ewe, upset 
at her own nakedness, the scrape and shuffle of 
heels and sheep's limbs on the floor, together with 
the "chck-clip, dick-clip" of the shears. 

As each ewe, finished with, struggled up, helped 
by a friendly shove, and bolted out dazedly into 
the pen, I could not help wondering what was 
passing in her head — in the heads of all those 
unceremoniously treated creatures; and, moving 
nearer to the postman, I said : 

"They're really very good, on the whole." 

He looked at me, I thought, queerly. 

"Yaas," he answered; "Mr. Molton's the best 
of them." 

I looked askance at Mr. Molton; but, with his 
knee crooked round a young ewe, he was shearing 
calmly. 

"Yes," I admitted, "he is certainly good." 

"Yaas," rephed the postman. 

Edging back into the darkness, away from that 
uncomprehending youth, I escaped into the air, 
and passing the remains of last year's stacks under 
the tall, toppling elms, sat down in a field under 
the bank. It seemed to me that I had food for 
thought. In that little misunderstanding between 
me and the postman was all the essence of the 
difference between that state of civilisation in 

35 



CONCERNING LIFE 

which sheep could prompt a sentiment; and that 
state in which sheep could not. 

The heat from the dropping sun, not far now 
above the moorline, struck full into the ferns and 
long grass of the bank where I was sitting, and 
the midges rioted on me in this last warmth. 
The wind was barred out, so that one had the full 
sweetness of the clover, fast becoming hay, over 
which the swallows were wheeling and swooping 
after flies. And far up, as it were the crown of 
Nature's beautiful devouring circle, a buzzard 
hawk, almost stationary on the air, floated, in- 
tent on something pleasant below him. A num- 
ber of little hens crept through the gate one by 
one, and came round me. It seemed to them that 
I was there to feed them; and they held their 
neat red or yellow heads to one side and the 
other, inquiring with their beady eyes, surprised 
at my stillness. They were pretty with their 
speckled feathers, and as it seemed to me, plump 
and young, so that I wondered how many of them 
would in time feed me. Finding, however, that 
I gave them nothing to eat, they went away, and 
there arose, in place of their clucking, the thin 
singing of air passing through some long tube. 
I knew it for the whining of my dog, who had 
nosed me out, but could not get through the pad- 

36 



SHEEP-SHEARING 

locked gate. And as I lifted him over, I was glad 
the postman could not see me — for I felt that to 
lift a dog over a gate would be against the princi- 
ples of one for whom the connection of sheep with 
good behaviour had been too strange a thought. 
And it suddenly rushed into my mind that the 
time would no doubt come when the conduct of 
appleS; being plucked from the mother tree, would 
inspire us, and we should say: "They're really 
very good!" And I wondered, were those future 
watchers of apple-gathering farther from me than 
I, watching sheep-shearing, from the postman? 
I thought, too, of the pretty dreams being dreamt 
about the land, and of the people who dreamed 
them. And I looked at that land, covered with 
the sweet pinkish-green of the clover, and con- 
sidered how much of it, through the medium of 
sheep, would find its way into me, to enable me to 
come out here and be eaten by midges, and specu- 
late about things, and conceive the sentiment of 
how good the sheep were. And it all seemed 
queer. I thought, too, of a world entirely com- 
posed of people who could see the sheen rippling 
on that clover, and feel a sort of sweet elation at 
the scent of it, and I wondered how much clover 
would be sown then? Many things I thought of, 
sitting there, till the sun sank below the moor- 

37 



CONCERNING LIFE 

line, the wind died off the clover, and the midges 
slept. Here and there in the iris-coloured sky a 
star crept out; the soft-hooting owls awoke. But 
still I lingered, watching how, one after another, 
shapes and colours died into twihght; and I won- 
dered what the postman thought of twilight, that 
inconvenient state, when things were neither dark 
nor light; and I wondered what the sheep were 
thinking this first night without their coats. 
Then, slinking along the hedge, noiseless, unheard 
by my sleeping spaniel, I saw a tawny dog steal- 
ing by. He passed without seeing us, licking his 
lean chops. 

"Yes, friend," I thought, "you have been after 
something very unholy; you have been digging up 
buried lamb, or some desirable person of that kind ! " 

Sneaking past, in this sweet night, which stirred 
in one such sentiment, that ghoulish cur was like 
the omnivorousness of Nature. And it came to 
me, how wonderful and queer was a world which 
embraced within it, not only this red gloating 
dog, fresh from his feast on the decaying flesh of 
lamb, but all those hundreds of beings in whom 
the sight of a fly with one leg shortened produced 
a quiver of compassion. For in this savage, slink- 
ing shadow, I knew that I had beheld a manifes- 
tation of divinity no less than in the smile of the 

38 



SHEEP-SHEARING 

sky, each minute growing more starry. With 
what Harmony — I thought — can these two be 
enwrapped in this round world so fast that it 
cannot be moved! What secret, marvellous, all- 
pervading Principle can harmonise these things! 
And the old words 'good' and 'evil' seemed to 
me more than ever quaint. 

It was almost dark, and the dew falling fast; 
I roused my spaniel to go in. 

Over the high-walled yard, the barns, the moon- 
white porch, dusk had brushedits velvet. Through 
an open window came a roaring sound. Mr. 
Molton was singing "The Happy Warrior," to 
celebrate the finish of the shearing. The big 
doors into the garden, passed through, cut off the 
full sweetness of that song; for there the owls were 
already masters of night with their music. 

On the dew-whitened grass of the lawn, we came 
on a little dark beast. My spaniel, liking its 
savour, stood with his nose at point; but, being 
called off, I could feel him obedient, still quiver- 
ing, under my hand. 

In the field, a wan huddle in the blackness, the 
dismantled sheep lay under a holly hedge. The 
wind had died; it was mist-warm. 

1910. 

\ 39 



EVOLUTION 

COMING out of the theatre, we found it ut- 
terly impossible to get a taxicab; and, 
though it was raining slightly, walked through 
Leicester Square in the hope of picking one up as it 
returned down Piccadilly. Numbers of hansoms 
and four-wheelers passed, or stood by the curb, 
hailing us feebly, or not even attempting to at- 
tract our attention, but every taxi seemed to have 
its load. At Piccadilly Circus, losing patience, 
we beckoned to a four-wheeler and resigned our- 
selves to a long, slow journey. A sou'-westerly 
air blew through the open windows, and there was 
in it the scent of change, that wet scent which 
visits even the hearts of towns and inspires the 
watcher of their myriad activities with thought 
of the restless Force that forever cries: "On, on!" 
But gradually the steady patter of the horse's 
hoofs, the rattling of the windows, the slow thud- 
ding of the wheels, pressed on us so drowsily that 
when, at last, we reached home we were more 
than half asleep. The fare was two shillings, and, 
standing in the lamplight to make sure the coin 

40 



EVOLUTION 

was a half-crown before handing it to the driver, 
we happened to look up. This cabman appeared 
to be a man of about sixty, with a long, thin face, 
whose chin and drooping grey moustaches seemed 
in permanent repose on the up-turned collar of 
his old blue overcoat. But the remarkable fea- 
tures of his face were the two furrows down his 
cheeks, so deep and hollow that it seemed as 
though that face were a collection of bones without 
coherent flesh, among which the eyes were sunk 
back so far that they had lost their lustre. He 
sat quite motionless, gazing at the taU of his horse. 
And, almost unconsciously, one added the rest 
of one's silver to that half-crown. He took the 
coins without speaking; but, as we were turning 
into the garden gate, we heard him say : 
"Thank you; you've saved my life." 
Not knowing, either of us, what to reply to 
such a curious speech, we closed the gate again 
and came back to the cab. 
"Are things so very bad?" 
"They are," repHed the cabman. "It's done 
with — is this job. We're not wanted now." And, 
taking up his whip, he prepared to drive away. 
"How long have they been as bad as this?" 
The cabman dropped his hand again, as though 
glad to rest it, and answered incoherently: 

41 



CONCERNING LIFE 

"Thirty-five year I've been drivin' a cab." 
And, sunk again in contemplation of his horse's 
tail, he could only be roused by many questions 
to express himself, having, as it seemed, no knowl- 
edge of the habit. 

"I don't blame the taxis, I don't blame nobody. 
It's come on us, that's what it has. I left the wife 
this morning with nothing in the house. She 
was saying to me only yesterday: 'What have 
you brought home the last four months?' 'Put 
it at six shillings a week,' I said. 'No,' she said, 
'seven.' Well, that's right — she enters it all down 
in her book." 

"You are really going short of food?" 
The cabman smiled; and that smile between 
those two deep hollows was surely as strange as 
ever shone on a human face. 

"You may say that," he said. "Well, what 
does it amount to? Before I picked you up, I 
had one eighteenpenny fare to-day; and yesterday 
I took five shillings. And I've got seven bob a 
day to pay for the cab, and that's low, too. 
There's many and many a proprietor that's broke 
and gone — every bit as bad as us. They let us 
down as easy as ever they can; you can't get 
blood from a stone, can you?" Once again he 
smiled. " I'm sorry for them, too, and I'm sorry 

42 



i 



EVOLUTION 

for the horses, though they come out best of the 
three of us, I do beheve." 

One of us muttered something about the 
PubHc. 

The cabman turned his face and stared down 
through the darkness. 

"The PubHc?" he said, and his voice had in it 
a faint suiprise. "Well, they all want the taxis. 
It's natural. They get about faster in them, and 
time's money. I was seven hours before I picked 
you up. And then you was lookin' for a taxi. 
Them as take us because they can't get better, 
they're not in a good temper, as a rule. And 
there's a few old ladies that's frightened of the 
motors, but old ladies aren't never very free with 
their money — can't afford to be, the most of them, 
I expect." 

"Everybody's sorry for you; one would have 
thought that " 

He interrupted quietly: "Sorrow don't buy 
bread. ... I never had nobody ask me about 
things before." And, slowly moving his long face 
from side to side, he added: "Besides, what could 
people do? They can't be expected to support 
you; and if they started askin' you questions 
they'd feel it very awkward. They know that, I 
suspect. Of course, there's such a lot of us; the 

43 



CONCERNING LIFE 

hansoms are pretty nigh as bad off as we are. 
Well; we're gettin' fewer eveiy day, that's one 
thing." 

Not knowing whether or no to manifest sym- 
pathy with this extinction, we approached the 
horse. It was a horse that "stood over" a good 
deal at the knee, and in the darkness seemed to 
have innumerable ribs. And suddenly one of us 
said : " Many people want to see nothing but taxis 
on the streets, if only for the sake of the horses." , 

The cabman nodded. 

"This old fellow," he said, "never carried a deal 
of flesh. His grub don't put spirit into him nowa- 
days; it's not up to much in quahty, but he gets 
enough of it." 

"And you don't?" 

The cabman again took up his whip. 

"I don't suppose," he said without emotion, 
"any one could ever find another job for me now. 
I've been at this too long. It'll be the workhouse, 
if it's not the other thing." 

And hearing us mutter that it seemed cruel, he 
smiled for the third time. 

"Yes," he said slowly, "it's a bit 'ard on us, be- 
cause we've done nothing to deserve it. But 
things are like that, so far as I can see. One 
thing comes pushin' out another, and so you go 

44 



EVOLUTION 

on. I've thought about it — you get to thinkin' 
and worryin' about the rights o' things, sittin' up 
here all day. No, I don't see anything for it. 
It'll soon be the end of us now — can't last much 
longer. And I don't know that I'll be sorry to 
have done with it. It's pretty well broke my 
spirit." 

"There was a fund got up." 

"Yes, it helped a few of us to learn the motor- 
drivin' ; but what's the good of that to me, at my 
time of Hfe? Sixty, that's my age; I'm not the 
only one — there's hundreds like me. We're not 
fit for it, that's the fact; we haven't got the nerve 
now. It'd want a mint of money to help us. 
And what you say's the truth — people want to see 
the end of us. They want the taxis — our day's 
over. I'm not complaining; you asked me about 
it yourself." 

And for the third time he raised his whip. 

"Tell me what you would have done if you had 
been given your fare and just sixpence over?" 

The cabman stared downward, as though puz- 
zled by that question. 

"Done? Why, nothing. What could I have 
done?" 

"But you said that it had saved your life." 

"Yes, I said that," he answered slowly; "I was 
45 



CONCERNING LIFE 

feelin' a bit low. You can't help it sometimes; 
it's the thing comin' on you, and no way out of it 
— that's what gets over you. We try not to think 
about it; as a rule." 

And this time, with a "Thank you, kindly!" he 
touched his horse's flank with the whip. Like a 
thing aroused from sleep the forgotten creature 
started and began to draw the cabman away 
from us. Very slowly they travelled down the 
road among the shadows of the trees broken by 
lamplight. Above us, white ships of cloud were 
sailing rapidly across the dark river of sky on the 
wind which smelled of change. And, after the 
cab was lost to sight, that wind still brought to us 
the dying sound of the slow wheels. 

1910. 



46 



RIDING IN MIST 

WET and hot, having her winter coat, the 
mare exactly matched the drenched fox- 
coloured beech-leaf drifts. As was her wont on 
such misty days, she danced along with head held 
high, her neck a little arched, her ears pricked, 
pretending that things were not what they seemed, 
and now and then vigorously trying to leave me 
planted on the air. Stones which had rolled out 
of the lane banks were her especial gobUns, for 
one such had maltreated her nerves before she 
came into this ball-room world, and she had not 
forgotten. 

There was no wind that day. On the beech- 
trees were still just enough of coppery leaves to 
look like fires Hghted high-up to air the eeriness; 
but most of the twigs, pearled with water, were 
patterned very naked against universal grey. 
Berries were few, except the pink spindle one, so 
far the most beautiful, of which there were more 
than Earth generally vouchsafes. There was no 
sound in the deep lanes, none of that sweet, over- 
head sighing of yesterday at the same hour, but 
there was a quality of silence — a dumb mist mur- 

47 



CONCERNING LIFE 

muration. We passed a tree with a proud pigeon 
sitting on its top spire, quite too heavy for the 
twig dehcacy below; undisturbed by the mare's 
hoofs or the creaking of saddle leather, he let us 
pass, absorbed in his world of tranquil turtle- 
doves. The mist had thickened to a white, in- 
finitesimal rain-dust, and in it the trees began to 
look strange, as though they had lost one another. 
The world seemed inhabited only by quick, sound- 
less wraiths as one trotted past. 

Close to a farm-house the mare stood still with 
that extreme suddenness peculiar to her at times, 
and four black pigs scuttled by and at once be- 
came white air. By now we were both hot and 
incHned to cling closely together and take liber- 
ties with each other; I telling her about her na- 
ture, name, and appearance, together with com- 
ments on her manners; and she giving forth that 
sterterous, sweet snuffle, which begins under the 
star on her forehead. On such days she did not 
sneeze, reserving those expressions of her joy for 
sunny days and the crisp winds. At a forking of 
the ways we came suddenly on one grey and three 
brown ponies, who shied round and flung away 
in front of us, a vision of pretty heads and haunches 
tangled in the thin lane, till, conscious that they 
were beyond their beat, they faced the bank and, 

48 



RIDING IN MIST 

one by one, scrambled over to join the other 
ghosts out on the dim common. 

Dipping down now over the road, we passed 
hounds going home. Pied, dumb-footed shapes, 
paddmg along in that soft-eyed, remote world of 
theirs, with a tall riding splash of red in front, 
and a tall splash of riding red behind. Then 
through a gate we came on to the moor, amongst 
whitened furze. The mist thickened. A curlew 
was whisthng on its invisible way, far up; and 
that wistful, wild calling seemed the very voice 
of the day. Keeping in view the ghnt of the 
road, we galloped; rejoicing, both of us, to be 
free of the jog-jog of the lanes. 

And first the voice of the curlew died; then the 
glint of the road vanished; and we were quite 
alone. Even the furze was gone; no shape of 
anything left, only the black, peaty ground, and 
the thickening mist. We might as well have been 
that lonely bird crossing up there in the bhnd 
white nothingness, like a human spirit wandering 
on the undiscovered moor of its own future. 

The mare jumped a pile of stones, which ap- 
peared, as it were, after we had passed over; and 
it came into my mind that, if we happened to 
strike one of the old quarry pits, we should in- 
fallibly be killed. Somehow, there was pleasure 

49 



CONCERNING LIFE 

in this thought; that we might, or might not, 
strike that old quarry pit. The blood in us being 
hot, we had pure joy in charging its white, im- 
palpable soHdity, wliich made way, and at once 
closed in behind us. There was great fun in this 
yard-by-yard discovery that we were not yet dead, 
this flying, shelterless challenge to whatever might 
lie out there, five yards in front. We felt su- 
premely above the wish to know that our necks 
were safe; we were happy, panting in the vapour 
that beat against our faces from the sheer speed of 
our galloping. Suddenly the ground grew lumpy 
and made up-hill. The mare slackened pace; we 
stopped. Before us, behind, to right and left, 
white vapour. No sky, no distance, barely the 
earth. No wind in our faces, no wind anywhere. 
At first we just got our breath, thought nothing, 
talked a little. Then came a chillness, a faint 
clutching over the heart. The mare snuffled; we 
turned and made down-hill. And stiU the mist 
thickened, and seemed to darken ever so little; 
we went slowly, suddenly doubtful of all that was 
in front. There came into our minds visions, so 
distant in that darkening vapour, of a warm stall 
and manger of oats; of tea and a log fire. The 
mist seemed to have fingers now, long, dark- 
white, crawling fingers; it seemed, too, to have in 

50 



RIDING IN MIST 

its sheer silence a sort of muttered menace, a 
shuddery lurkingness, as if from out of it that 
spirit of the unknown, which in hot blood we had 
just now so gleefully mocked, were creeping up 
at us, intent on its vengeance. Since the ground 
no longer sloped, we could not go down-hill ; there 
were no means left of telHng in what direction we 
were moving, and we stopped to listen. There 
was no sound, not one tiny noise of water, wind 
in trees, or man; not even of birds or the moor 
ponies. And the mist darkened. The mare 
reached her head down and walked on, smelling 
at the heather; every time she sniffed, one's heart 
quivered, hoping she had found the way. She 
threw up her head, snorted, and stood still; and 
there passed just in front of us a pony and her 
foal, shapes of scampering dusk, whisked like 
blurred shadows across a sheet. Hoof-silent in 
the long heather — as ever were visiting ghosts — 
they were gone in a flash. The mare plunged 
forward, following. But, in the feel of her gallop, 
and the feel of my heart, there was no more that 
ecstasy of facing the unknown; there was only 
the cold, hasty dread of loneliness. Far asunder 
as the poles were those two sensations, evoked 
by this same motion. The mare swerved vio- 
lently and stopped. There, passing within three 

51 



CONCERNING LIFE 

yards, jrom the same direction as before, the sound- 
less shapes of the pony and her foal flew by again, 
more intangible, less dusky now against the darker 
screen. Were we, then, to be haunted by those 
bewildering uncanny ones, flitting past ever from 
the same direction? This time the mare did not 
follow, but stood still; knowing as well as I that 
direction was quite lost. Soon, with a whimper, 
she picked her way on again, smelHng at the 
heather. And the mist darkened! 

Then, out of the heart of that dusky whiteness, 
came a tiny sound; we stood, not breathing, turn- 
ing our heads. I could see the mare's eye fixed 
and straining at the vapour. The tiny sound 
grew till it became the muttering of wheels. The 
mare dashed forward. The muttering ceased un- 
timely; but she did not stop; turning abruptly 
to the left, she slid, scrambled, and dropped into 
a trot. The mist seemed whiter below us; we 
were on the road. And involuntarily there came 
from me a sound, not quite a shout, not quite an 
oath. I saw the mare's eye turn back, faintl}^ 
derisive, as who should say : Alone I did it ! Then 
slowly, comfortably, a Httle ashamed, we jogged 
on, in the mood of men and horses when danger 
is over. So pleasant it seemed now, in one short 
half-hour, to have passed through the circle-swing 

52 



RIDING IN MIST 

of the emotions, from the ecstasy of hot reckless- 
ness to the clutching of chill fear. But the meet- 
ing-point of those two sensations we had left out 
there on the mysterious moor! Why, at one mo- 
ment, had we thought it finer than anything on 
earth to risk the breaking of our necks; and the 
next, shuddered at being lost in the darkening 
mist with winter night fast coming on? 

And very luxuriously we turned once more into 
the lanes, enjoying the past, scenting the future. 
Close to home, the first little eddy of wind stirred, 
and the song of dripping twigs began; an owl 
hooted, honey-soft, in the fog. We came on two 
farm hands mending the lane at the turn of the 
avenue, and, curled on the top of the bank, their 
cosy red colhe pup, waiting for them to finish 
work for the day. He raised his sharp nose and 
looked at us dewily. We turned down, padding 
softly in the wet fox-red drifts under the beech- 
trees, whereon the last leaves still fhckered out in 
the darkening whiteness, that now seemed so fit- 
tie eerie. We passed the grey-green skeleton of 
the farm-yard gate. A hen ran across us, cluck- 
ing, into the dusk. The mare drew her long, 
home-coming snuffle, and stood still. 

1910. 

53 



THE PROCESSION 

IN one of those corners of our land canopied by 
the fumes of blind industry, there was, on that 
day, a lull in darkness. A fresh wind had split the 
customary heaven, or roof of hell; was sweeping 
long drifts of creamy clouds across a blue still pal- 
lid with reek. The sun even shone — a sun whose 
face seemed white and wondering. And under 
that rare sun all the little town, among its slag 
heaps and few tall chimneys, had an air of living 
faster. In those continuous courts and alleys, 
where the women worked, smoke from each Httle 
forge rose and dispersed into the wind with strange 
alacrity; amongst the women, too, there was that 
same eagerness, for the smishine had crept in and 
was making pale all those dark-raftered, sooted 
ceilings which covered them in, together with 
their immortal comrades, the small open furnaces. 
About their work they had been busy since seven 
o'clock; their feet pressing the leather lungs 
which fanned the conical heaps of glowing fuel, 
their hands poking into the glow a thin iron rod 
till the end could be curved into a fiery hook; 
snapping it with a mallet; threading it with tongs 

54 



THE PROCESSION 

on to the chain; hammering, closing the Hnk; and, 
without a second's pause, thrusting the iron rod 
again into the glow. And while they worked 
they chattered, laughed sometimes, now and then 
sighed. They seemed of all ages and all types; 
from her who looked like a peasant of Provence, 
broad, brown, and strong, to the weariest white 
consumptive wisp; from old women of seventy, 
with straggling grey hair, to fifteen-year-old girls. 
In the cottage forges there would be but one 
worker, or two at most; in the shop forges four, 
or even five, little glowing heaps; four or five of 
the grimy, pale lung-bellows; and never a moment 
without a fieiy hook about to take its place on 
the growing chains, never a second when the thin 
smoke of the forges, and of those lives consuming 
slowly in front of them, did not escape from out 
of the dingy, whitewashed spaces past the dark 
rafters, away to freedom. 

But there had been in the air that morning 
something more than the white sunlight. There 
had been anticipation. And at two o'clock began 
fulfilment. The forges were stilled, and from 
court and alley forth came the women. In their 
ragged working clothes, in their best clothes — 
so little different; in bonnets, in hats, bareheaded; 
with babies bora and unborn, they swarmed into 

55 



CONCERNING LIFE 

the high street and formed across it behind the 
band. A strange, magpie, jay-hke flock; black, 
white, patched with brown and green and blue, 
shifting, chattering, laughing, seeming uncon- 
scious of any purpose. A thousand and more of 
them, with faces twisted and scored by those 
myriad deformings which a desperate town-toil- 
ing and little food fasten on human visages; yet 
with hardly a single evil or brutal face. Seem- 
ingly it was not easy to be evil or brutal on a wage 
that scarcely bound soul and body. A thousand 
and more of the poorest-paid and hardest-worked 
human beings in the world. 

On the pavement alongside this strange, acqui- 
escing assembly of revolt, about to march in pro- 
test against the conditions of their lives, stood a 
young woman without a hat and in poor clothes, 
but with a sort of beauty in her rough-haired, high- 
cheek-boned, dark-eyed face. She was not one 
of them; yet, by a stroke of Nature's irony, there 
was graven on her face alone of all those faces, 
the true look of rebellion ; a haughty, almost fierce, 
uneasy look — an untamed look. On all the other 
thousand faces one could see no bitterness, no 
fierceness, not even enthusiasm; only a half-stolid, 
half-vivacious patience and eagerness as of chil- 
dren going to a party. 

56 



THE PROCESSION 

The band played; and they began to march. 
Laughing, talking, waving flags, trying to keep 
step; with the same expression slowly but surely 
coming over every face; the future was not; only 
the present — this happy present of marching be- 
hind the discordance of a brass band; this strange 
present of crowded movement and laughter in 
open air. 

We others — some dozen accidentals like my- 
self, and the tall, grey-haired lady interested in 
"the people," together with those few kind spirits 
in charge of "the show" — marched too, a little 
self-conscious, desiring with a vague military sen- 
sation to hold our heads up, but not too much, 
under the eyes of the curious bystanders. These 
— nearly all men — were well-wishers, it was said, 
though their faces, pale from their own work in 
shop or furnace, expressed nothing but apathy. 
They wished well, very dumbly, in the presence 
of this new thing, as if they found it queer that 
women should be doing something for themselves; 
queer and rather dangerous. A few, indeed, shuf- 
fled along between the column and the little hope- 
less shops and grimy factory sheds, and one or 
two accompanied their women, carrying the baby. 
Now and then there passed us some better-to-do 
citizen — a housewife, or lawyer's clerk, or iron- 

57 



CONCERNING LIFE 

monger, with lips pressed rather tightly together 
and an air of taking no notice of this disturb- 
ance of traffic, as though the whole thing were a 
rather poor joke which they had already heard 
too often. 

So, with laughter and a continual crack of 
voices our jay-like crew swung on, swaying and 
thumping in the strange ecstasy of irreflection, 
happy to be moving they knew not where, nor 
greatly why, under the visiting sun, to the sound 
of murdered music. Whenever the band stopped 
playing, discipline became as tatterdemaHon as 
the very flags and garments; but never once did 
they lose that look of essential order, as if indeed 
they knew that, being the worst-served creatures 
in the Christian world, they were the chief guard- 
ians of the inherent dignity of man. 

Hatless, in the yery front row, marched a tall 
slip of a girl, arrow-straight, and so thin, with 
dirty fair hair, in a blouse and skirt gaping behind, 
ever turning her pretty face on its pretty slim 
neck from side to side, so that one could see her 
blue eyes sweeping here, there, everywhere, with 
a sort of flower-like wildness, as if a secret em- 
bracing of each moment forbade her to let them 
rest on anything and break this pleasure of just 
marching. It seemed that in the never-still eyes 

58 



THE PROCESSION 

of that ansemic, happy girl the spirit of our march 
had elected to enshrine itself and to make thence 
its little excursions to each ecstatic follower. Just 
behind her marched a little old woman — a maker 
of chains, they said, for forty years — whose black 
slits of eyes were sparkling, who fluttered a bit of 
ribbon, and reeled with her sense of the exquisite 
humour of the world. Every now and then she 
would make a rush at one of her leaders to demon- 
strate how immoderately glorious was life. And 
each time she spoke the woman next to her, laden 
with a heavy baby, went off into squeals of laugh- 
ter. Behind her, again, marched one who beat 
time with her head and waved a little bit of stick, 
intoxicated by this noble music. 

For an hour the pageant wound through the 
dejected street, pursuing neither method nor set 
route, till it came to a deserted slag-heap, selected 
for the speech-making. Slowly the motley regi- 
ment swung into that grim amphitheatre under 
the pale sunshine; and, as I watched, a strange 
fancy visited my brain. I seemed to see over 
every ragged head of those marching women a 
little yellow flame, a thin, flickering gleam, spir- 
ing upward and blown back by the wind. A trick 
of the sunlight, maybe? Or was it that the life 
in their hearts, the inextinguishable breath of 

59 



CONCERNING LIFE 

happiness, had for a moment escaped prison, and 
was fluttering at the pleasure of the breeze? 

Silent now, just enjoying the sound of the words 
thrown down to them, they stood, unimaginably 
patient, with that happiness of they knew not 
what gilding the air above them between the 
patchwork ribands of their poor flags. If they 
could not tell very much why they had come, nor 
beheve very much that they would gain anything 
by coming; if their demonstration did not mean 
to the world quite all that oratory would have 
them think; if they themselves were but the poor- 
est, humblest, least learned women in the land — 
for all that, it seemed to me that in those tattered, 
wistful figures, so still, so trustful, I was looking 
on such beauty as I had never beheld. All the 
elaborated glory of things made, the perfected 
dreams of sesthetes, the embroideries of romance, 
seemed as nothing beside this sudden vision of 
the wild goodness native in humble hearts. 

1910. 

V 



60 



A CHRISTIAN 

ONE day that summer, I came away from a 
luncheon in company of an old College 
chum. Always exciting to meet those one hasn't 
seen for years; and as we walked across the Park 
together I kept looking at him askance. He had 
altered a good deal. Lean he always was, but 
now very lean, and so upright that his parson's 
coat was overhung by the back of his long and 
narrow head, with its dark grizzled hair, which 
thought had not yet loosened on his forehead. 
His clean-shorn face, so thin and oblong, was re- 
markable only for the eyes: dark-browed and 
lashed, and coloured like bright steel, they had a 
fixity in them, a sort of absence, on one couldn't 
tell what business. They made me think of tor- 
ture. And his mouth always gently smiling, as if 
its pinched curly sweetness had been commanded, 
was the mouth of a man crucified — ^yes, crucified! 
Tramping silently over the parched grass, I felt 
that if we talked, we must infalUbly disagree; his 
straight-up, narrow forehead so suggested a nature 
divided within itself into compartments of iron. 

61 



CONCERNING LIFE 

It was hot that day, and we rested presently 
beside the Serpentine. On its bright waters were 
the usual young men, sculling themselves to and 
fro with their usual sad energy, the usual prome- 
naders loitering and watching them, the usual dog 
that swam when it did not bark, and barked when 
it did not swim; and my friend sat smiling, twist- 
ing between his thin fingers the little gold cross 
on his silk vest. 

Then all of a sudden we did begin to talk; and 
not of those matters of which the well-bred nat- 
urally converse — the habits of the rarer kinds of 
ducks, and the careers of our College friends, 
but of something never mentioned in polite so- 
ciety. 

At lunch our hostess had told me the sad story 
of an unhappy marriage, and I had itched spirit- 
ually to find out what my friend, who seemed so 
far away from me, felt about such things. And 
now I determined to find out. 

"Tell me," I asked him, "which do you con- 
sider most important — the letter or the spirit of 
Christ's teachings?" 

"My dear fellow," he answered gently, "what 
a question! How can you separate them?" 

"Well, is it not the essence of His doctrine that 
the spirit is all important, and the forms of Httle 

62 



A CHRISTIAN 

value? Does not that run through all the Ser- 
mon on the Mount?" 

"Certainly." 

"If, then," I said, "Christ's teaching is con- 
cerned with the spirit, do you consider that Chris- 
tians are justified in holding others bound by for- 
mal rules of conduct, without reference to what 
is passing in their spirits?" 

" If it is for their good." 

"What enables you to decide what is for their 
good?" 

"Surely, we are told." 

"Not to judge, that ye be not judged." 

"Oh! but we do not, ourselves, judge; we are 
but impersonal ministers of the rules of God." 

" Ah ! Do general rules of conduct take account 
of the variations of the individual spirit?" 

He looked at me hard, as if he began to scent 
heresy. 

"You had better explain yourself more fully," 
he said. "I really don't follow." 

"Well, let us take a concrete instance. We 
know Christ's saying of the married that they are 
one flesh! But we know also that there are wives 
who continue to live the married life with dread- 
ful feelings of spiritual revolt — wives who have 
found out that, in spite of all their efforts, they 

63 



CONCERNING LIFE 

have no spiritual afi&nity with their husbands. 
Is that in accordance with the spirit of Ctirist's 
teaching; or is it not?" 

"We are told — " he began. 

"I have admitted the definite commandment: 
'They twain shall be one flesh.' There could not 
be, seemingly, any more rigid law laid down; how 
do you reconcile it with the essence of Christ's 
teaching? Frankly, I want to know: Is there or 
is there not a spiritual coherence in Christianity, 
or is it only a gathering of laws and precepts, with 
no inherent connected spiritual philosophy?" 

"Of course," he said, in his long-suffering voice, 
"we don't look at things like that — ^for us there is 
no questioning." 

"But how do you reconcile such marriages as 
I speak of, with the spirit of Christ's teaching? 
I think you ought to answer me." 

"Oh! I can, perfectly," he answered; "the 
reconciliation is through suffering. What a poor 
woman in such a case must suffer makes for the 
salvation of her spirit. That is the spiritual ful- 
filment, and in such a case the justification of the 
law." 

"So then," I said, "sacrifice or suffering is the 
coherent thread of Christian philosophy?" 

"Suffering cheerfully borne," he answered. 
64 



A CHRISTIAN 

"You do not think/' I said, "that there is a 
touch of extravagance in that? Would you say, 
for example, that an unhappy marriage is a more 
Christian thing than a happy one, where there is 
no suffering, but only love?" 

A hne came between his brows. "Well!" he 
said at last, "I would say, I think, that a woman 
who crucifies her flesh with a cheerful spirit in 
obedience to God's law, stands higher in the eyes 
of God than one who undergoes no such sacrifice 
in her married life." And I had the feeling that 
his stare was passing through me, on its way to 
an unseen goal. 

"You would desire, then, I suppose, suffering 
as the greatest blessing for yourself?" 

"Humbly," he said, "I would try to." 

"And naturally, for others?" 

"God forbid!" 

"But surely that is inconsistent." 

He murmured: "You see, / have suffered." 

We were silent. At last I said: "Yes, that 
makes much which was dark quite clear to me." 

"Oh?" he asked. 

I answered slowly: "Not many men, you know, 
even in your profession, have really suffered. 
That is why they do not feel the difficulty which 
you feel in desiring suffering for others." 

65 



CONCERNING LIFE 

He threw up his head exactly as if I had hit 
him on the jaw: "It's weakness in me, I know/' 
he said. 

"I should have rather called it weakness in 
them. But suppose you are right, and that it's 
weakness not to be able to desire promiscuous 
suffering for others, would you go further and say 
that it is Christian for those, who have not expe- 
rienced a certain kind of suffering, to force that 
particular kind on others?" 

He sat silent for a full minute, trying evidently 
to reach to the bottom of my thought. 

"Surely not," he said at last, "except as min- 
isters of God's laws." 

"You do not then think that it is Christian for 
the husband of such a woman to keep her in that 
state of suffering — not being, of course, a minister 
of God?" 

He began stammering at that: "I — I — " he 
said. "No; that is, I think not — not Christian. 
No, certainly." 

"Then, such a marriage, if persisted in, makes 
of the wife indeed a Christian, but of the husband 
— the reverse." 

"The answer to that is clear," he said quietly: 
"The husband must abstain." 

"Yes, that is, perhaps, coherently Christian, 
66 



A CHRISTIAN 

on your theory: They would then both suffer. 
But the marriage, of course, has become no mar- 
riage. They are no longer one flesh." 

He looked at me, almost impatiently, as if to 
say: Do not compel me to enforce silence on you! 

"But, suppose," I went on, "and this, you 
know, is the more frequent case, the man refuses 
to abstain. Would you then say it was more 
Christian to allow him to become daily less Chris- 
tian through his unchristian conduct, than to re- 
lieve the woman of her suffering at the expense 
of the spiritual benefit she thence derives? Why, 
in fact, do you favour one case more than the 
other?" 

"All question of relief," he replied, "is a matter 
for Csesar; it cannot concern me." 

There had come into his face a rigidity — as if 
I might hit it with my questions till my tongue 
was tired, and it be no more moved than the 
bench on which we were sitting. 

"One more question," I said, "and I have done. 
Since the Christian teaching is concerned with the 
spirit and not forms, and the thread in it which 
binds all together and makes it coherent, is that 
of suffering " 

"Redemption by suffering," he put in. 

"If you will — in one word, self-crucifixion — I 
67 



CONCERNING LIFE 

must ask you, and don't take it personally, be- 
cause of what you told me of yourself: In life gen- 
erally, one does not accept from people any teach- 
ing that is not the result of first-hand experience 
on their parts. Do you believe that this Chris- 
tian teaching of yours is vaUd from the mouths 
of those who have not themselves suffered— who 
have not themselves, as it were, been crucified?" 

He did not answer for a minute; then he said, 
with painful slowness: "Christ laid hands on his 
apostles and sent them forth; and they in turn, 
and so on, to our day." 

"Do you say, then, that this guarantees that 
they have themselves suffered, so that in spirit 
they are identified with their teaching?" 

He answered bravely: "No — I do not — I can- 
not say that in fact it is always so." 

"Is not then their teaching born of forms, and 
not of the spirit?" 

He rose; and with a sort of deep sorrow at my 
stubbornness said: "We are not permitted to 
know the way of this; it is so ordained; we must 
have faith." 

As he stood there, turned from me, with his hat 
off, and his neck painfully flushed under the sharp 
outcurve of his dark head, a feeling of pity surged 
up in me, as if I had taken an unfair advantage. 

68 



A CHRISTIAN 

"Reason — coherence— philosophy," he said sud- 
denly. " You don't understand. All that is noth- 
ing to me — nothing — nothing!" 

1911. 



69 



WIND IN THE ROCKS 

THOUGH dew-dark when we set forth; there 
was stealing into the frozen air an invisible 
white host of the wan-winged light — born beyond 
the mountains, and already, like a drift of doves, 
harbouring grey-white high up on the snowy sky- 
caves of Monte Cristallo; and within us, tramping 
over the valley meadows, was the incredible ela- 
tion of those who set out before the sun has risen ; 
every minute of the precious day before us — we 
had not lost one! 

At the mouth of that enchanted chine, across 
which for a million years the howdahed rock ele- 
phant has marched, but never yet passed from 
sight, we crossed the stream, and among the trees 
began our ascent. Very far away the first cow- 
bells chimed; and, over the dark heights, we saw 
the thin, sinking moon, looking like the white 
horns of some devotional beast watching and wait- 
ing up there for the god of light. That god came 
slowly, stalking across far over our heads from 
top to top ; then, of a sudden, his flame- white form 
was seen standing in a gap of the valley walls; the 

70 



WIND IN THE ROCKS 

trees flung themselves along the ground before 
him, and censers of pine gum began swinging in 
the dark aisles, releasing their perfumed steam. 
Throughout these happy ravines where no man 
lives, he shows himself naked and unashamed, the 
colour of pale honey; on his golden hair such shin- 
ing as one has not elsewhere seen ; his eyes like old 
wine on fire. And already he had swept his hand 
across the invisible strings, for there had arisen 
the music of uncurling leaves and flitting things. 

A legend runs, that, driven from land to land 
by Christians, Apollo hid himself in Lower Aus- 
tria, but those who aver they saw him there in the 
thirteenth century were wrong; it was to these 
enchanted chines, frequented only by the moun- 
tain shepherds, that he certainly came. 

And as we were lying on the grass of the first 
alp, with the star gentians — those fallen drops of 
the sky — and the burnt-brown dandelions, and 
scattered shrubs of alpen-rose round us, we were 
visited by one of these very shepherds, passing 
with his flock — the fiercest-looking man who ever 
spoke in a gentle voice; six feet high, with an 
orange cloak, bare knees, burnt as the very dan- 
dehons, a beard blacker than black, and eyes more 
glorious than if sun and night had dived and were 
lying imprisoned in their depths. He spoke in 

71 



CONCERNING LIFE 

an unknown tongue, and could certainly not under- 
stand any word of ours; but he smelled of the good 
earth, and only through interminable watches 
under sun and stars could so great a gentleman 
have been perfected. 

Presently, while we rested outside that Alpine 
hut which faces the three sphinx-like mountains, 
there came back, from climbing the smallest and 
most dangerous of those peaks, one, pale from 
heat, and trembling with fatigue ; a tall man, with 
long brown hands, and a long, thin, bearded face. 
And, as he sipped cautiously of red wine and water, 
he looked at his little conquered mountain. His 
kindly, screwed-up eyes, his kindly, bearded lips, 
even his limbs seemed smiling; and not for the 
world would we have jarred with words that rapt, 
smiling man, enjoying the sacred hour of him who 
has just proved himself. In silence we watched, 
in silence left him smiling, knowing somehow that 
we should remember him all our days. For there 
was in his smile the glamour of adventure just for 
the sake of danger; all that high instinct which 
takes a man out of his chair to brave what he 
need not. 

Between that hut and the three mountains lies 
a saddle — astride of all beauty and all colour, 
master of a titanic chaos of deep clefts, tawny 

72 



WIND IN THE ROCKS 

heights, red domes, far snow, and the purple of 
long shadows; and, standing there, we compre- 
hended a little of what Earth had been through 
in her time, to have made this playground for 
most glorious demons. Mother Earth! What 
travail undergone, what long heroic throes, had 
brought on her face such majesty! 

Hereabout edelweiss was clinging to the 
smoothed-out rubble; but a little higher, even 
the everlasting plant was lost, there was no more 
life. And presently we lay down on the moun- 
tain side, rather far apart. Up here above trees 
and pasture the wind had a strange, bare voice, 
free from all outer influence, sweeping along with 
a cold, whiffling sound. On the warm stones, in 
full sunlight, uplifted over all the beauty of Italy, 
one felt at first only delight in space and wild love- 
liness, in the unknown valleys, and the strength 
of the sun. It was so good to be ahve; so ineffably 
good to be living in this most wonderful world, 
drinking air nectar. 

Behind us, from the three mountains, came the 
frequent thud and scuffle of falling rocks, loosened 
by rains. The wind, mist, and winter snow had 
ground the powdery stones on which we lay to a 
pleasant bed, but once on a time they, too, had 
clung up there. And very slowly, one could not 

73 



CONCERNING LIFE 

say how or when, the sense of joy began changing 
to a sense of fear. The awful impersonahty of 
those great rock-creatures, the terrible impar- 
tiality of that cold; clinging wind which swept 
by, never an inch lifted above ground ! Not one 
tiny soul, the size of a midge or rock flower, 
lived here. Not one httle "I" breathed here, 
and loved! 

And we, too, some day would no longer love, 
having become part of this monstrous, lovely 
earth, of that cold, whiffling air. To be no longer 
able to love! It seemed incredible, too grim to 
bear; yet it was true! To become powder, and 
the wind; no more to feel the sunlight; to be loved 
no more ! To become a whiffling noise, cold, with- 
out one's self! To drift on the breath of that 
noise, homeless! Up here, there were not even 
those little velvet, grey- white flower-comrades we 
had plucked. No life ! Nothing but the creeping 
wind, and those great rocky heights, whence came 
the sound of falling — symbols of that cold, un- 
timely state into which we, too, must pass. Never 
more to love, nor to be loved! One could but 
turn to the earth, and press one's face to it, away 
from the wild loveliness. Of what use loveliness 
that must be lost; of what use loveliness when one 
could not love? The earth was warm and firm 

74 



WIND IN THE ROCKS 

beneath the palms of the hands; but there still 
came the sound of the impartial wind, and the 
careless roar of the stones falling. 

Below, in those valleys amongst the living trees 
and grass, was the comradeship of unnumbered 
life, so that to pass out into Peace, to step beyond, 
to die, seemed but a brotherly act, amongst all 
those others; but up here, where no creature 
breathed, we saw the heart of the desert that 
stretches before each httle human soul. Up here, 
it froze the spirit; even Peace seemed mocking — 
hard as a stone. Yet, to tiy and hide, to tuck one's 
head under one's own wing, was not possible in 
this air so crystal clear, so far above incense and 
the narcotics of set creeds, and the fevered breath 
of prayers and protestations. Even to know that 
between organic and inorganic matter there is no 
gulf fixed, was of no peculiar comfort. The jealous 
wind came creeping over the lifeless limestone, 
removing even the poor solace of its warmth; one 
turned from it, desperate, to look up at the sky, 
the blue, burning, wide, ineffable, far sky. 

Then slowly, without reason, that icy fear 
passed into a feeling, not of joy, not of peace, but 
as if Life and Death were exalted into what was 
neither life nor death, a strange and motionless 
vibration, in which one had been merged, and 

75 



CONCERNING LIFE 

rested; utterly content; equipoised; divested of de- 
sire; endowed with life and death. 

But since this moment had come before its time, 
we got up; and; close together; marched on rather 
silently; in the hot sun. 

1910. 

/ 



76 



MY DISTANT RELATIVE 

THOUGH I had not seen my distant relative 
for years — not, in fact, since he was obHged 
to give Vancouver Island up as a bad job — I knew 
him at once, when, with head a little on one side, 
and tea-cup held high, as if to confer a blessing, 
he said: "Hallo!" across the Club smoking-room. 

Thin as a lath — not one ounce heavier — tall, 
and very upright, with his pale forehead, and pale 
eyes, and pale beard, he had the air of a ghost of 
a man. He had always had that air. And his 
voice — that matter-of-fact and slightly nasal 
voice, with its thin, pragmatical tone — was like a 
wraith of optimism, issuing between pale lips. I 
noticed, too, that his town habiliments stUl had 
their unspeakable pale neatness, as if, poor things, 
they were trying to stare the daylight out of 
countenance. 

He brought his tea across to my bay window, 
with that wistful sociability of his, as of a man 
who cannot always find a listener. 

" But what are you doing in town? " I said. " I 
thought you were in Yorkshire with your aunt." 

Over his round, light eyes, fixed on something 
77 



CONCERNING LIFE 

in the street, the Uds fell quickly twice, as the 
film falls over the eyes of a parrot. 

"I'm after a job/' he answered. "Must be on 
the spot just now." 

And it seemed to me that I had heard those 
words from him before. 

"Ah, yes," I said, "and do you think you'll 
get it?" 

But even as I spoke I felt sorry, remembering 
how many jobs he had been after in his time, and 
how soon they ended when he had got them. He 
answered : 

"Oh, yes! They ought to give it me," then 
added rather suddenly: " You never know, though. 
People are so funny!" 

And crossing his thin legs, he went on to tell 
me, with quaint impersonality, a number of in- 
stances of how people had been funny in connec- 
tion with jobs he had not been given. 

"You see," he ended, "the country^'s in such a 
state — capital going out of it every day. Enter- 
prise being killed all over the place. There's prac- 
tically nothing to be had!" 

"Ah!" I said, "you think it's worse, then, than 
it used to be?" 

He smiled; in that smile there was a shade of 
patronage. 

78 



MY DISTANT RELATIVE 

"We're going down-hill as fast as ever we can. 
National character's losing all its backbone. No 
wonder, with all this molly-coddhng going on!" 

"Oh!" I murmured, "molly-coddling? Isn't 
that excessive?" 

"Well! Look at the way everything's being 
done for them! The working classes are losing 
their self-respect as fast as ever they can. Their 
independence is gone already!" 

"You think?" 

"Sure of it! I'll give you an instance — " and 
he went on to describe to me the degeneracy of 
certain worldng men employed by his aunt and his 
eldest brother Claud and his youngest brother Alan. 

"They don't do a stroke more than they're 
obliged;" he ended; "they know jolly well they've 
got their Unions, and their pensions, and this 
Insurance, to fall back on." 

It was evidently a subject on which he felt 
strongly. 

"Yes," he muttered, "the nation is being 
rotted down." 

And a faint thrill of surprise passed through 
me. For the affairs of the nation moved him so 
much more strongly than his own. His voice 
already had a different ring, his e3^es a different 
look. He eagerly leaned forward, and his long, 

79 



CONCERNING LIFE 

straight backbone looked longer and straighter 
than ever. He was less the ghost of a man. A 
faint flush even had come into his pale cheeks, 
and he moved his well-kept hands emphatically. 

"Oh; yes!" he said: "The country is going to 
the dogs, right enough; but you can't get them to 
see it. They go on sapping and sapping the inde- 
pendence of the people. If the working man's 
to be looked after, whatever he does — what on 
earth's to become of his go, and foresight, and 
perseverance?" 

In his rising voice a certain piquancy was left 
to its accent of the ruling class by that faint 
twang, which came, I remembered, from some 
slight defect in his tonsils. 

"Mark my words! So long as we're on these 
lines, we shall do nothing. It's going against 
evolution. They say Darwin's getting old-fash- 
ioned; all I know is, he's good enough for me. 
Competition is the only thing." 

"But competition," I said, "is bitter cruel, and 
some people can't stand against it!" And I 
looked at him rather hard: "Do you object to 
putting any sort of floor under the feet of people 
like that?" 

He let his voice drop a little, as if in deference 
to my scruples. 

80 



MY DISTANT RELATIVE 

"Ah!" he said; "but if you once begin this sort 
of thing, there's no end to it. It's so insidious. 
The more they have, the more they want; and 
all the time they're losing fighting power. I've 
thought pretty deeply about this. It's short- 
sighted; it really doesn't do!" 

"But," I said, "surely you're not against sav- 
ing people from being knocked out of time by old 
age, and accidents like illness, and the fluctua- 
tions of trade?" 

"Oh!" he said, "I'm not a bit against charity. 
Aunt Emma's splendid about that. And Claud's 
awfully good. I do what I can, myself." He 
looked at me, so queerly deprecating, that I quite 
liked him at that moment. At heart — I felt — 
he was a good fellow. "All I think is," he went 
on, "that to give them something that they can 
rely on as a matter of course, apart from their 
own exertions, is the wrong principle altogether," 
and suddenly his voice began to rise again, and his 
eyes to stare. "I'm convinced that all this doing 
things for other people, and bolstering up the weak, 
is rotten. It stands to reason that it must be." 

He had risen to his feet, so preoccupied with 
the wrongness of that principle that he seemed 
to have forgotten my presence. And as he stood 
there in the window the light was too strong for 

81 



CONCERNING LIFE 

him. All the thin incapacity of that shadowy- 
figure was pitilessly displayed; the desperate nar- 
rowness in that long, pale face ; the wambling look 
of those pale, well-kept hands — all that made him 
such a ghost of a man. But his nasal, dogmatic 
voice rose and rose. 

"There's nothing for it but bracing up! We 
must cut away all this State support; we must 
teach them to rely on themselves. It's all sheer 
pauperisation." 

And suddenly there shot through me the fear 
that he might burst one of those little blue veins 
in his pale forehead, so vehement had he become; 
and hastily I changed the subject. 

"Do you like living up there with your aunt?" 
I asked: "Isn't it a bit quiet?" 

He turned, as if I had awakened him from a 
dream. 

"Oh, well!" he said, "it's only till I get this 
job." 

"Let me see — ^how long is it since you ?" 

"Four years. She's very glad to have me, of 
course." 

"And how's your brother Claud?" 

"Oh! All right, thanks; a bit worried with the 
estate. The poor old gov'nor left it in rather a 
mess, you know." 

82 



MY DISTANT RELATIVE 

"Ah! Yes. Does he do other work?" 

"Oh! Always busy in the parish." 

"And your brother Richard?" 

"He's all right. Came home this year. Got 
just enough to live on, with his pension — hasn't 
saved a rap, of course." 

"And Willie? Is he stiU deHcate?" 

"Yes." 

"I'm sorry." 

"Easy job, his, you know. And even if his 
health does give out, his college pals will always 
find him some sort of sinecure. So jolly popular, 
old Willie!" 

"And Alan? I haven't heard anything of him 
since his Peruvian thing came to grief. He mar- 
ried, didn't he?" 

"Rather! One of the Burleys. Nice girl — 
heiress; lot of property in Hampshire. He looks 
after it for her now." 

"Doesn't do anything else, I suppose?" 

"Keeps up his antiquarianism." 

I had exhausted the members of his family. 

Then, as though by ehciting the good fortunes 
of his brothers I had cast some slur upon himself, 
he said suddenly: "If the railway had come, as it 
ought to have, while I was out there, I should 
have done quite well with my fruit farm." 

83 



CONCERNING LIFE 

"Of course," I agreed; "it was bad luck. But 
after all, you're sure to get a job soon, and — so 
long as you can live up there with your aunt — ^you 
can afford to wait, and not bother." 

"Yes," he murmured. And I got up. 

"Well, it's been very jolly to hear about you 
all!" 

He followed me out. 

"Awfully glad, old man," he said, "to have 
seen you, and had this talk. I was feeling rather 
low. Waiting to know whether I get that ^ob 
— it's not lively." 

He came down the Club steps with me. By the 
door of my cab a loafer was standing; a tall tatter- 
demalion with a pale, bearded face. My distant 
relative fended him away, and leaning through 
the window, murmured: "Awful lot of these chaps 
about now!" 

For the Hfe of me I could not help looking at 
him very straight. But no flicker of apprehen- 
sion crossed his face. 

"Well, good-by again!" he said: "You've 
cheered me up a lot!" 

I glanced back from my moving cab. Some 
monetary transaction was passing between him 
and the loafer, but, short-sighted as I am, I found 
it difficult to decide which of those tall, pale, 

84 



MY DISTANT RELATIVE 

bearded figures was giving the other one a penny. 
And by some strange freak an awful vision shot 
up before me — of myself, and my distant relative, 
and Claud, and Richard, and Willie, and Alan, 
all suddenly relying on ourselves. I took out my 
handkerchief to mop my brow; but a thought 
struck me, and I put it back. Was it possible for 
me, and my distant relatives, and their distant 
relatives, and so on to infinity of those who be- 
longed to a class provided by birth with a certain 
position, raised by Pro\^dence on to a platform 
made up of money inherited, of interest, of educa- 
tion fitting us for certain privileged pursuits, of 
friends similarly endowed, of substantial homes, 
and substantial relatives of some sort or other, 
on whom we could fall back — was it possible for 
any of us ever to be in the position of having to 
rely absolutely on ourselves? For several min- 
utes I pondered that question; and slowly I came 
to the conclusion that, short of crime, or that un- 
likely event, marooning, it was not possible. 
Never, never — try as we might — could any single 
one of us be quite in the position of one of those 
whose approaching pauperisation my distant rela- 
tive had so vehemently deplored. We were al- 
ready pauperised. If we served our country, we 
were pensioned. If we inherited land, it could not 

85 



CONCERNING LIFE 

be taken from us. If we went into the Church, 
we were there for Ufe, whether we were suitable 
or no. If we attempted the more hazardous occu- 
pations of the law, medicine, the arts, or business, 
there were always those homes, those relations, 
those friends of ours to fall back on, if we failed. 
No! We could never have to rely entirely on 
ourselves; we could never be pauperised — more 
than we were already! And a light burst in on 
me. That explained why my distant relative felt 
so keenly. It bit him, for he saw, of course, how 
dreadful it would be for these poor people of the 
working classes when legislation had succeeded in 
placing them in the humiliating position in which 
we already were — the dreadful position of having 
something to depend on apart from our own exer- 
tions, some sort of security in our lives. I saw 
it now. It was his secret pride, gnawing at liim 
all the time, that made him so rabid on the point. 
He was longing, doubtless, day and night, not to 
have had a father who had land, and had left a 
sister well enough off to keep him while he was 
waiting for his job. He must be feeling how hor- 
ribly degrading was the position of Claud — in- 
heriting that land; and of Richard, who, just be- 
cause he had served in the Indian Civil Service, 
had got to live on a pension all the rest of his days; 

86 



MY DISTANT RELATIVE 

and of Willie; who was in danger at any moment, 
if his health — always dehcate — gave out, of hav- 
ing a sinecure found for him by his college friends; 
and of Alan, whose educated charm had enabled 
him to marry an heiress and hve by managing her 
estates. All, all sapped of go and foresight and 
perseverance by a cruel Pro\ddence! That was 
what he was really feeling, and concealing, be- 
cause he was too well-bred to show his secret 
grief. And I felt suddenly quite warm toward 
him, now that I saw how he was suffering. I 
understood how bound he felt in honour to com- 
bat with all his force this attempt to place others 
in his own distressing situation. At the same 
time I was honest enough to confess to myself — 
sitting there in the cab — that I did not personally 
share that pride of his, or feel that I was being 
rotted by my own position; I even felt some dim 
gratitude that if my powers gave out at any time, 
and I had not saved anything, I should still not 
be left destitute to face the prospect of a bleak 
and impoverished old age; and I could not help a 
weak pleasure in the thought that a certain rela- 
tive security was being guaranteed to those peo- 
ple of the working classes who had never had it 
before. At the same moment I quite saw that 
to a prouder and stronger heart it must indeed be 

87 



CONCERNING LIFE 

bitter to have to sit still under your own security, 
and even more bitter to have to watch that pau- 
perising security coming closer and closer to others 
— for the generous soul is always more concerned 
for others than for himself. No doubt, I thought, 
if truth were known, my distant relative is con- 
sumed with longing to change places with that 
loafer who tried to open the door of my cab — for 
surely he must see, as I do, that that is just what 
he himself — having failed to stand the pressure of 
competition in his life — would be doing if it were 
not for the accident of his birth, which has so lam- 
entably insured him against coming to that. 

"Yes," I thought, "you have learnt something 
to-day; it does not do, you see, hastily to despise 
those distant relatives of yours, who talk about 
pauperising and molly-coddhng the lower classes. 
No, no! One must look deeper than that! One 
must have generosity ! " 

And with that I stopped the cab and got out, 
for I wanted a breath of air. 

1911. 



THE BLACK GODMOTHER 

SITTING out on the lawn at tea with our 
friend and his retriever, we had been dis- 
cussing those massacres of the helpless which had 
of late occurred, and wondering that they should 
have been committed by the soldiery of so civi- 
Hsed a State, when, in a momentary pause of our 
astonishment, our friend, who had been listening 
in silence, crumpling the drooping soft ear of his 
dog, looked up and said, "The cause of atrocities 
is generally the violence of Fear. Panic's at the 
back of most crimes and follies." 

Knowing that his philosophical statements were 
always the result of concrete instance, and that 
he would not tell us what that instance was if we 
asked him — such being his nature — we were care- 
ful not to agree. 

He gave us a look out of those eyes of his, so 
like the eyes of a mild eagle, and said abruptly: 
"What do you say to this, then? ... I was out 
in the dog-days last year with this fellow of mine, 
looking for Osmunda, and stayed some days in a 
village — never mind the name. Coming back one 

89 



CONCERNING LIFE 

evening from my tramp, I saw some boys stoning 
a mealy-coloured dog. I went up and told the 
young devils to stop it. They only looked at 
me in the injured way boys do, and one of them 
called out, 'It's mad, guv'nor!' I told them to 
clear off, and they took to their heels. The dog 
followed me. It was a young, leggy, mild-looldng 
mongrel, cross — I should say — between a brown 
retriever and an Irish terrier. There was froth 
about its lips, and its eyes were watery; it looked 
indeed as if it might be in distemper. I was 
afraid of infection for this fellow of mine, and 
whenever it came too close shooed it away, till at 
last it slunk off altogether. Well, about nine 
o'clock, when I was settling down to write by the 
open window of my sitting-room — still daylight, 
and very quiet and warm — there began that most 
maddening sound, the barking of an unhappy dog. 
I could do nothing with that continual 'Yap — 
yap ! ' going on, and it was too hot to shut the win- 
dow; so I went out to see if I could stop it. The 
men were all at the pub, and the women just fin- 
ished with their gossip; there was no sound at all 
but the continual barking of this dog, somewhere 
away out in the fields. I travelled by ear across 
three meadows, till I came on a hay-stack by a 
pool of water. There was the dog sure enough — 

90 



THE BLACK GODMOTHER 

the same mealy-coloured mongrel, tied to a stake, 
yapping, and making frantic little runs on a bit 
of rusty chain; whirling round and round the 
stake, then standing quite still, and shivering. I 
went up and spoke to it, but it backed into the 
hay-stack, and there it stayed shrinking away from 
me, with its tongue hanging out. It had been 
heavily struck by something on the head; the 
cheek was cut, one eye half-closed, and an ear 
badly swollen. I tried to get hold of it, but the 
poor thing was beside itself with fear. It snapped 
and flew round so that I had to give it up, and sit 
down with this fellow here beside me, to try and 
quiet it — a strange dog, you know, will generally 
form his estimate of you from the way it sees you 
treat another dog. I had to sit there quite half 
an hour before it would let me go up to it, pull the 
stake out, and lead it away. The poor beast, 
though it was so feeble from the blows it had re- 
ceived, was still half-frantic, and I didn't dare to 
touch it; and all the time I took good care that 
this fellow here didn't come too near. Then came 
the question what was to be done. There was 
no vet, of course, and I'd no place to put it except 
my sitting-room, which didn't belong to me. But, 
looking at its battered head, and its half-mad 
eyes, I thought: 'No trusting you with these 

91 



CONCERNING LIFE 

bumpkins; you'll have to come in here for the 
night!' Well, I got it in, and heaped two or 
three of those hairy little red rugs landladies are 
so fond of, up in a corner, and got it on to them, 
and put down my bread and milk. But it 
wouldn't eat — its sense of proportion was all gone, 
fairly destroyed by terror. It lay there moaning, 
and every now and then it raised its head with a 
'yap' of sheer fright, dreadful to hear, and bit 
the air, as if its enemies were on it again ; and this 
fellow of mine lay in the opposite corner, with 
his head on his paw, watching it. I sat up for a 
long time with that poor beast, sick enough, and 
wondering how it had come to be stoned and 
kicked and battered into this state; and next day 
I made it my business to find out." Our friend 
paused, scanned us a little angrily, and then went 
on: "It had made its first appearance, it seems, 
following a bicyclist. There are men, you know 
— save the mark — ^who, when their beasts get ill 
or too expensive, jump on their bicycles and take 
them for a quick run, taking care never to look 
behind them. When they get back home they 
say: 'Hallo! where's Fido?' Fido is nowhere, and 
there's an end! Well, this poor puppy gave up 
just as it got to our village; and, roaming about 
in search of water, attached itself to a farm la- 

92 



THE BLACK GODMOTHER 

bourer. The man — with excellent intentions, as 
he told me himself — tried to take hold of it, but 
too abruptly, so that it was startled, and snapped 
at him. Whereon he kicked it for a dangerous 
cur, and it went drifting back toward the village^ 
and fell in with the boys coming home from school. 
It thought, no doubt, that they were going to 
kick it too, and nipped one of them who took it 
by the collar. Thereupon they hullabalooed and 
stoned it down the road to where I found them. 
Then I put in my little bit of torture, and drove 
it away, through fear of infection to my own dog. 
After that it seems to have fallen in with a man 
who told me: 'Well, you see, he came sneakin' 
round my house, with the children playin', and 
snapped at them when they went to stroke him, 
so that they came running in to their mother, an' 
she called to me in a fine takin' about a mad dog. 
I ran out with a shovel and gave 'im one, and 
drove him out. I'm sorry if he wasn't mad, he 
looked it right enough; you can't be too careful 
with strange dogs.' Its next acquaintance was 
an old stone-breaker, a very decent sort. 'Well! 
you see,' the old man explained to me, 'the dog 
came smellin' round my stones, an' it wouldn' 
come near, an' it wouldn' go away; it was all froth 
and blood about the jaw, and its eyes glared green 
at me. I thought to meself, bein' the dog-days 

93 



CONCERNING LIFE 

— I don't like the look o' you, you look funny! 
So I took a stone, an' got it here, just on the ear; 
an' it fell over. And I thought to meself: Well, 
you've got to finish it, or it'll go bitin' somebody, 
for sure! But when I come to it with my ham- 
mer, the dog it got up — an' you know how it is 
when there's somethin' you've 'alf killed, and you 
feel sorry, and yet you feel you must finish it, an' 
you hit at it bhnd, you hit at it agen an' agen. 
The poor thing, it wriggled and snapped, an' I 
was terrified it'd bite me, an' some'ow it got 
away.'" Again our friend paused, and this time 
we dared not look at him. 

"The next hospitality it was shown," he went 
on presently, "was by a farmer, who, seeing it all 
bloody, drove it off, thinking it had been digging 
up a lamb that he'd just buried. The poor home- 
less beast came sneaking back, so he told his men 
to get rid of it. Well, they got hold of it somehow 
— there was a hole in its neck that looked as if 
they'd used a pitchfork — and, mortally afraid of 
its biting them, but not liking, as they told me, to 
drown it, for fear the owner might come on them, 
they got a stake and a chain, and fastened it up, 
and left it in the water by the hay-stack where I 
found it. I had some conversation with that 
farmer. 'That's right,' he said, 'but who was to 
know? I couldn't have my sheep worried. The 

94 



THE BLACK GODMOTHER 

brute had blood on his muzzle. These curs do 
a lot of harm when they've once been blooded. 
You can't run risks.'" Our friend cut viciously 
at a dandehon with his stick. "Run risks!" he 
broke out suddenly: "That was it — from begin- 
ning to end of that poor beast's sufferings, fear! 
From that fellow on the bicycle, afraid of the 
woriy and expense, as soon as it showed signs of 
distemper, to myseK and the man with the pitch- 
fork — not one of us, I daresay, would have gone 
out of our way to do it a harm. But we felt fear, 
and so — ^by the law of self-preservation, or what- 
ever you like — it all began, till there the poor 
thing was, with a battered head and a hole in its 
neck, ravenous with hunger, and too distraught 
even to lap my bread and milk. Yes, and there's 
something uncanny about a suffering animal — we 
sat watching it, and again we were afraid, look- 
ing at its eyes and the way it bit the air. Fear! 
It's the black godmother of all damnable things!" 
Our friend bent down, crumpling and crump- 
Hng at his dog's ears. We, too, gazed at the 
ground, thinking of that poor lost puppy, and the 
horrible inevitability of all that happens, seeing 
men are what they are; thinking of all the foul 
doings in the world, whose black godmother is 
Fear. 

95 



CONCERNING LIFE 

"And what became of the poor dog?" one of 
us asked at last. 

"When/' said our friend slowly, "I'd had my 
fill of watching, I covered it with a rug, took this 
fellow away with me, and went to bed. There 
was nothing else to do. At dawn I was awakened 
by three dreadful cries — not like a dog's at all. 
I hurried down. There was the poor beast — 
wriggled out from under the rug — stretched on 
its side, dead. This fellow of mine had followed 
me in, and he went and sat down by the body. 
When I spoke to him he just looked round, and 
wagged his tail along the ground, but would not 
come away; and there he sat till it was buried, 
very interested, but not sorry at all." 

Our friend was silent, looking angrily at some- 
thing in the distance. 

And we, too, were silent, seeing in spirit that 
vigil of early morning: The thin, lifeless, sandy- 
coloured body, stretched on those red mats; and 
this black creature — now lying at our feet — 
propped on its haunches like the dog in "The 
Death of Procris," patient, curious, ungrieved, 
staring down at it with his bright, interested eyes. 

1912. 



96 



THE GRAND JURY— IN TWO PANELS 
AND A FRAME 

I READ that piece of paper, which summoned 
me to sit on the Grand Jury at the approach- 
ing Sessions, lying in a scoop of the shore close to 
the great rollers of the sea — that span of eternal 
freedom, deprived just there of too great liberty 
by the word "Atlantic." And I remember think- 
ing, as I read, that in each breaking wave was 
some particle which had visited every shore in all 
the world — that in each sparkle of hot sunlight 
stealing that bright water up into the sky, was 
the microcosm of all change, and of all unity. 

PANEL I 

In answer to that piece of paper, I presented 
myself at the proper place in due course and with 
a certain trepidation. What was it that I was 
about to do? For I had no experience of these 
things. And; being too early, I walked a little to 
and fro, looking at all those my partners in this 
matter of the purification of Society. Prosecutors, 
witnesses, officials, policemen, detectives, un- 

97 



CONCERNING LIFE 

detected; pressmen, barristers; loaferS; clerkS; 
cadgerS; jurymen. And I remember having some- 
thing of the feehng that one has when one looks 
into a sink without holding one's nose. There 
was such uneasy huriy, so strange a disenchanted 
look, a sort of spiritual dirt; about all that placC; 
and there were — faces! And I thought: To them 
my face must seem as their faces seem to me ! 

Soon I was taken with my accomplices to have 
my name called; and to be sworn. I do not re- 
member much about that process, too occupied 
with wondering what these companions of mine 
were like; but presently we all came to a long 
room with a long table, where nineteen lists of 
indictments and nineteen pieces of blotting paper 
were set alongside nineteen pens. We did not, 
I recollect, speak much to one another, but sat 
down, and studied those nineteen hsts. We had 
eighty-seven cases on which to pronounce whether 
the bill was true or no; and the clerk assured us 
we should get through them in two days at most. 
Over the top of these indictments I regarded my 
eighteen fellows. There was in me a hunger of 
inquiry, as to what they thought about this busi- 
ness ; and a sort of sorrowful affection for them, as 
if we were all a ship's company bound on some 
strange and awkward expedition. I wondered, 

98 



THE GRAND JURY 

till I thought my wonder must be coming through 
my eyes, whether they had the same curious sen- 
sation that I was feehng, of doing something 
illegitimate; which I had not been born to do, to- 
gether with a sense of self-importance, a sort of 
unholy interest in thus dealing with the lives of 
my fellow men. And slowly, watching them, I 
came to the conclusion that I need not wonder. 
All — with the exception perhaps of two, a painter 
and a Jew — looked such good citizens. I became 
gradually sure that they were not troubled with 
the lap and wash of speculation; undogged by any 
devastating sense of unity; pure of doubt, and 
undefiled by an uneasy conscience. 

But now they began to bring us in the evidence. 
They brought it quickly. And at first we looked 
at it, whatever it was, with a sort of solemn ex- 
citement. Were we not arbiters of men's fates, 
purifiers of Society, more important by far than 
Judge or Common Jury? For if we did not bring 
in a true bill there was an end; the accused would 
be discharged. 

We set to work, slowly at first, then faster and 
still faster, bringing in true bills; and after every 
one making a mark in our lists so that we might 
know where we were. We brought in true bills 
for burglaiy, and false pretences, larceny, and 

99 



CONCERNING LIFE 

fraud; we brought them in for manslaughter, rape, 
and arson. When we had ten or so, two of us 
would get up and bear them away down to the 
Court below and lay them before the Judge. 
"Thank you, gentlemen!" he would say, or words 
to that effect; and we would go up again, and go 
on bringing in true bills. I noticed that at the 
evidence of each fresh bill we looked with a httle 
less excitement, and a httle less solemnity, mak- 
ing every time a shorter tick and a shorter note 
in the margin of our lists. All the bills we had 
— fifty-seven — we brought in true. And the 
morning and the afternoon made that day, till 
we rested and went to our homes. 

Next day we were all back in our places at the 
appointed hour, and, not greeting each other much, 
at once began to bring in bills. We brought 
them in, not quite so fast, as though some lurking 
megrim, some microbe of dissatisfaction with our- 
selves was at work within us. It was as if we 
wanted to throw one out, as if we felt our work 
too perfect. And presently it came. A case of 
defrauding one Sophie Liebermann, or Lauber- 
mann, or some such foreign name, by giving her 
one of those five-pound Christmas-card bank- 
notes just then in fashion, and receiving from her, 
as she alleged, three real sovereigns change. There 

100 



THE GRAND JURY 

was a certain piquancy about the matter, and I 
well remember noticing how we sat a little forward 
and turned in our seats when they brought in 
the prosecutrix to give evidence. Pale, self-pos- 
sessed, dressed in black, and rather comely, neither 
brazen nor furtive, speaking but poor English, her 
broad, matter-of-fact face, with its wide-set grey 
eyes and thickish nose and lips, made on me, I 
recollect, an impression of rather stupid honesty. 
I do not think they had told us in so many words 
what her calling was, nor do I remember whether 
she actually disclosed it, but by our demeanour 
I could tell that we had all reahzed what was the 
nature of the service rendered to the accused, in 
return for which he had given her this worthless 
note. In her rather guttural but pleasant voice 
she answered all our questions — not very far from 
tears, I think, but saved by native stoHdity, and 
perhaps a little by the fear that purifiers of So- 
ciety might not be the proper audience for emo- 
tion. When she had left us we recalled the detec- 
tive, and still, as it were, touching the delicate 
matter with the tips of our tongues, so as not, 
being men of the world, to seem biassed against 
anything, we definitely elicited from him her pro- 
fession and these words: "If she's speaking the 
truth, gentlemen; but, as you know, these women, 

101 



CONCERNING LIFE 

they don't always, specially the foreign ones!" 
When he, too, had gone, we looked at each other 
in unwonted silence. None of us quite liked, it 
seemed, to be first to speak. Then our foreman 
said: "There's no doubt, I think, that he gave 
her the note — ^mean trick, of course, but we can't 
have him on that alone — bit too irregular — no con- 
sideration in law, I take it." 

He smiled a little at our smiles, and then went 
on: "The question, gentlemen, really seems to 
be, are we to take her word that she actually gave 
him change?" Again, for quite half a minute, 
we were silent, and then, the fattest one of us said, 
suddenly: "Very dangerous — goin' on the word 
of these women." 

And at once, as if he had released something 
in our souls, we all (save two or three) broke out. 
It wouldn't do! It wasn't safe! Seeing what 
these women were! It was exactly as if, without 
word said, we had each been swearing the other 
to some secret compact to protect Society. As 
if we had been whispering to each other something 
like this: "These women — of course, we need 
them, but for all that we can't possibly recognise 
them as within the Law; we can't do that without 
endangering the safety of eveiy one of us. In 
this matter we are trustees for all men — indeed, 

102 



THE GRAND JURY 

even for ourselves, for who knows at what moment 
we might not ourselves require their services, and 
it would be exceedingly awkward if their word 
were considered the equal of our own!" Not one 
of us, certainly saw:? anything so crude as this; none 
the less did many of us feel it. Then the foreman, 
looking slowly round the table, said: "Well, gen- 
tlemen, I think we are all agreed to throw out 
this bill"; and all, except the painter, the Jew, and 
one other, murmured: "Yes." And, as though, 
in throwing out this bill we had cast some trouble 
off our minds, we went on with the greater speed, 
bringing in true bills. About two o'clock we fin- 
ished, and trooped down to the Court to be 
released. On the stairway the Jew came close, 
and, having examined me a little sharply with his 
velvety slits of eyes, as if to see that he was not 
making a mistake, said: "Ith fonny — we bring in 
eighty-thix bills true, and one we throw out, and 
the one we throw out we know it to be true, and 
the dirtieth job of the whole lot. Ith fonny!" 
"Yes," I answered him, "our sense of respecta- 
biHty does seem excessive." But just then we 
reached the Court, where, in his red robe and 
grey wig, with his clear-cut, handsome face, the 
judge seemed to shine and radiate, like sun through 
gloom. "I thank you, gentlemen," he said, in a 

103 



CONCERNING LIFE 

voice courteous and a little mocking, as though 
he had somewhere seen us before: "I thank you 
for the way in which you have performed your 
duties. I have not the pleasure of assigning to 
you anji^hing for your services except the privilege 
of going over a prison, where you will be able to 
see what sort of existence awaits many of those to 
whose cases you have devoted so much of your 
valuable time. You are released, gentlemen." 

Looking at each other a Httle hurriedly, and 
not taking too much farewell, for fear of having to 
meet again, we separated. 

I was, then, free — free of the injimction of that 
piece of paper reposing in my pocket. Yet its 
influence was still upon me. I did not hurry away, 
but lingered in the courts, fascinated by the notion 
that the fate of each prisoner had first passed 
through my hands. At last I made an effort, and 
went out into the corridor. There^ I passed a 
woman whose figure seemed familiar. She was sit- 
ting with her hands in her lap looking straight 
before her, pale-faced and not uncomely, with 
thickish mouth and nose — the woman whose bill 
we had thrown out. Why was she sitting there? 
Had she not then realised that we had quashed her 
claim; or was she, like myself, kept here by mere 
attraction of the Law? Following I know not 

104 



THE GRAND JURY 

what impulse, I said: "Your case was dismissed, 
wasn't it?" She looked up at me stolidly, and a 
tear, which had evidently been long gathering, 
dropped at the movement. "I do nod know; I 
waid to see," she said in her thick voice; "I tink 
there has been mistake." My face, no doubt, be- 
trayed something of my sentiments about her case, 
for the thick tears began rolling fast down her 
pasty cheeks, and her pent-up feeling suddenly 
flowed forth in words: "I work 'ard; Gott! how I 
work hard! And there gomes dis liddle beastly 
man, and rob me. And they say: 'Ah! yes; but 
you are a bad woman, we don' trust you — ^you 
speak lie.' But I speak druth, I am nod a bad 
woman — I gome from Hamburg." "Yes, yes," 
I murmured; "yes, yes." "I do not know this 
country well, sir. I speak bad English. Is that 
why they do not drust my word? " She was silent 
for a moment, searching my face, then broke out 
again : " It is all 'ard work in my profession, I make 
very liddle, I cannot afford to be rob. Without 
the men I cannod make my living, I must drust 
them — and they rob me like this, it is too 'ard." 
And the slow tears rolled faster and faster from her 
eyes on to her hands and her black lap. Then 
quietly, and looking for a moment singularly like a 
big, unhappy child, she asked: "Will you blease 

105 



CONCERNING LIFE 

dell me, sir, why they will not give me the law of 
that dirty little man?" 

I knew — and too well; but I could not tell her. 

"You see, " I said, "it's just a case of your word 
against his." 

"Oh! no; but," she said eagerly, "he give me 
the note — I would not have taken it if I 'ad not 
thought it good, would I? That is sure, isn't it? 
But five pounds it is not my price. It must that 
I give 'im change! Those gentlemen that heard 
my case, they are men of business, they must know 
that it is not my price. If I could tell the judge 
— I think he is a man of business too — he would 
know that too, for sure. I am not so young. I 
am not so veree beautiful as all that; he must see, 
mustn't he, sir?" 

At my wits' end how to answer that most strange 
question, I stammered out: "But, you know, your 
profession is outside the law. " 

At that a slow anger dyed her face. She looked 
down; then, suddenly lifting one of her dirty, un- 
gloved hands, she laid it on her breast with the 
gesture of one baring to me the truth in her heart. 
" I am not a bad woman, " she said : " Dat beastly 
little man, he do the same as me — I am free-wom- 
an, I am not a slave bound to do the same to-mor- 
row night, no more than he. Such like him make 

106 



THE GRAND JURY 

me what I am; he have all the pleasure, I have all 
the work. He give me noding — ^he rob my poor 
money, and he make me seem to strangers a bad 
woman. Oh, dear! I am not happy ! " 

The impulse I had been having to press on her 
the money, died within me; I felt suddenly it 
would be another insult. From the movement 
of her fingers about her heart I could not but see 
that this grief of hers was not about the money. 
It was the inarticulate outburst of a bitter sense 
of deep injustice; of all the dumb wondering at 
her own fate that went about with her behind that 
broad stolid face and bosom. This loss of the 
money was but a symbol of the furtive, hopeless 
insecurity she lived with day and night, now 
forced into the light, for herself and all the world 
to see. She felt it suddenly a bitter, unfair thing. 
This beastly little man did not share her inse- 
curity. None of us shared it — none of us, who had 
brought her down to this. And, quite unable to 
explain to her how natural and proper it all was, 
I only murmured: "I am sorry, awfully sorry," 
and fled away. 

PANEL II 

It was just a week later when, having for pass- 
port my Grand Jury summons, I presented myself 

107 



CONCERNING LIFE 

at that prison where we had the privilege of seeing 
the existence to which we had assisted so many of 
the eighty-six. 

"I'm afraid," I said to the guardian of the gate, 
"that I am rather late in availing myself — the 
others, no doubt ?" 

"Not at all, sir," he said, smiHng. "You're 
the first, and if you'll excuse me, I think you'll 
be the last. Will you wait in here while I send 
for the chief warder to take you over?" 

He showed me then to what he called the Ward- 
er's Library — an iron-barred room, more bare and 
brown than any I had seen since I left school. 
While I stood there waiting and staring out into 
the prison court-yard, there came, rolling and 
rumbhng in, a Black Maria. It drew up with a 
clatter, and I saw through the barred door the 
single prisoner — a young girl of perhaps eighteen 
— dressed in rusty black. She was resting her 
forehead against a bar and looking out, her quick, 
narrow dark eyes taking in her new surroundings 
with a sort of sharp, restless indifference ; and her 
pale, thin-lipped, oval face quite expressionless. 
Behind those bars she seemed to me for all the 
world like a little animal of the cat tribe being 
brought in to her Zoo. Me she did not see, but 
if she had I felt she would not shrink — only give 

108 



THE GRAND JURY 

me the same sharp, indifferent look she was giv- 
ing all else. The policeman on the step behind 
had disappeared at once, and the driver now got 
down from his perch and, coming roimd, began to 
gossip with her. I saw her slink her eyes and smile 
at him, and he smiled back ; a large man, not un- 
kindly. Then he returned to his horses, and she 
stayed as before, with her forehead against the 
bars, just staring out. Watching her like that, 
unseen, I seemed to be able to see right through 
that tight-lipped, lynx-eyed mask. I seemed to 
know that little creature through and through, as 
one knows anjrthing that one surprises off its 
guard, sunk in its most private moods. I seemed 
to see her little restless, furtive, utterly immoral 
soul, so stripped of all defence, as if she had taken 
it from her heart and handed it out to me. I saw 
that she was one of those whose hands sHp as 
indifferently into others' pockets as into their own; 
incapable of fidehty, and incapable of tiiisting; 
quick as cats, and as devoid of application ; ready 
to scratch, ready to purr, ready to scratch again; 
quick to change, and secretly as unchangeable as 
a little pebble. And I thought: "Here we are, 
taking her to the Zoo (by no means for the first 
time, if demeanour be any guide), and we shall 
put her in a cage, and make her sew, and give her 

109 



CONCERNING LIFE 

good books which she will not read; and she will 
seW; and walk up and down, until we let her out; 
then she will return to her old haunts, and at once 
go prowhng and do exactly the same again, what- 
ever it was, luitil we catch her and lock her up 
once more. And in this way we shall go on 
purif3dng Society until she dies. And I thought: 
If indeed she had been created cat in body as well 
as in soul, we should not have treated her thus, 
but should have said: 'Go on, little cat, you 
scratch us sometimes, you steal often, you are as 
sensual as the night. All this we cannot help. It 
is your nature. So were you made — we know you 
cannot change — ^you amuse us! Go on, little cat!' 
Would it not then be better, and less savoury of 
humbug if we said the same to her whose cat-soul 
has chanced into this human shape? For as- 
suredly she will but pilfer, and scratch a little, and 
be mildly vicious, in her Httle life, and do no des- 
perate harm, having but poor capacity for evil 
behind that petty, thin-lipped mask. What is 
the good of all this padlock business for such as 
she ; are we not making mountains out of her mole- 
hills? Where is our sense of proportion, and our 
sense of humour? Why try to alter the make and 
shape of Nature with our petty chisels? Or, if we 
must take care of her, to save ourselves, in the 

110 



THE GRAND JURY 

name of Heaven let us do it in a better way than 
this! And suddenly I remembered that I was a 
Grand Juryman, a purifier of Society, who had 
brought her bill in true; and, that I might not 
think these thoughts unworthy of a good citizen, 
I turned my eyes away from her and took up my 
list of indictments. Yes, there she was, at least 
so I decided: Number 42, "Pilson, Jenny: Lar- 
ceny, pocket-picking. " And I turned my memory 
back to the evidence about her case, but I could 
not remember a single word. In the margin I had 
noted: "Incorrigible from a child up; bad sur- 
roundings. " And a mad impulse came over me to 
go back to my window and call through the bars 
to her: "Jenny Pilson! Jenny Pilson! It was I 
who bred you and surrounded you with evil! It 
was I who caught you for being what I made you ! 
I brought your biU in true! I judged you, and I 
caged you! Jenny Pilson! Jenny Pilson ! " But 
just as I reached the window, the door of my wait- 
ing-room was fortunately opened, and a voice said : 
"Now, sir; at your service!" . . . 

I sat again in that scoop of the shore by the long 
rolling seas, burying in the sand the piece of paper 
which had summoned me away to my Grand Jury; 
and the same thoughts came to me with the break- 

111 



CONCERNING LIFE 

ing of the waves that had come to me before: 
How, in every wave was a particle that had known 
the shore of every land ; and in each sparkle of the 
hot sunlight stealing up that bright water into the 
sky, the microcosm of all change and of all unity! 

1912. 



> 



112 



GONE 

NOT possible to conceive of rarer beauty than 
that which clung about the summer day 
three years ago when first we had the news of the 
poor Herds. Loveliness was a net of golden fila- 
ments in which the world was caught. It was 
gravity itself, so tranquil; and it was a sort of 
intoxicating laughter. From the top field that we 
crossed to go down to their cottage, all the far 
sweep of those outstretched wings of beauty could 
be seen. Very wonderful was the poise of the 
sacred bird, that moved nowhere but in our hearts. 
The lime-tree scent was just stealing out into air 
for some days already bereft of the scent of hay; 
and the sun was falling to his evening home be- 
hind our pines and beeches. It was no more than 
radiant warm. And, as we went, we wondered 
why we had not been told before that Mrs. Herd 
was so very ill. It was foolish to wonder — these 
people do not speak of suffering till it is late. 
To speak, when it means what this meant — ^loss 
of wife and mother — was to flatter reality too 
much. To be healthy, or — die! That is their 

113 



CONCERNING LIFE 

creed. To go on till they drop — ^then very soon 
pass away! What room for states between — on 
their poor wage, in their poor cottages? 

We crossed the mill-stream in the hollow — to 
their white, thatched dwelling; silent, already 
awed, almost resentful of this so-varying Scheme 
of Things. At the gateway Herd himself was 
standing, just in from his work. For work in the 
country does not wait on illness — even death 
claims from its onlookers but a few hours, birth 
none at all. And it is as well; for what must be 
must, and in work alone man rests from grief. 
Sorrow and anxiety had made strange alteration 
already in Herd's face. Through everv crevice 
of the rough, stolid mask the spirit was peeping, 
a sort of quivering suppliant, that seemed to ask 
all the time: "Is it true?" A regular cottager's 
figure, this of Herd's — a labourer of these parts — 
strong, slow, but active, with just a touch of the 
untamed somewhere, about the swing and car- 
riage of him, about the strong jaw, and wide thick- 
lipped mouth; just that something independent, 
which, in great variety, clings to the natives of 
these still remote, half-pagan valleys by the moor. 

We all moved silently to the lee of the outer 
wall, so that our voices might not carry up to the 
sick woman lying there under the eaves, almost 

114 



GONE 

within hand reach. "Yes, sir." "No, sir." "Yes, 
ma'am." This, and the constant, unforgettable 
suppUcation of his eyes, was all that came from 
him; yet he seemed loath to let us go, as though he 
thought we had some mysterious power to help 
him — the magic, perhaps, of money, to those who 
have none. Grateful at our promise of another 
doctor, a specialist, he yet seemed with his eyes 
to say that he knew that such were only em- 
broideries of Fate. And when we had wrung his 
hand and gone, we heard him coming after us. 
His wife had said she would Uke to see us, please. 
Would we come up? 

An old woman and Mrs. Herd's sister were in 
the sitting-room; they showed us to the crazy, 
narrow stairway. Though we lived distant but 
four hundred yards of a crow's flight, we had never 
seen Mrs. Herd before, for that is the way of things 
in this land of minding one's own business — a slight, 
dark, girlish-looking woman, almost quite refined 
away, and with those eyes of the dying, where the 
spirit is coming through, as it only does when it 
knows that all is over except just the passing. 
She lay in a double bed, with clean white sheets. 
A white-washed room, so low that the ceiling al- 
most touched our heads, some flowers in a bowl, the 
small lattice window open. Though it was hot 

115 



CONCERNING LIFE 

in there, it was better far than the rooms of most 
f amiUes in towns, hving on a wage of twice as much ; 
for here was no sign of defeat in decency or cleanU- 
ness. In her face, as in poor Herd's, was that same 
strange minghng of resigned despair and almost 
eager appeal, so terrible to disappoint. Yet, try- 
ing not to disappoint it, one felt guilty of treachery. 
What was the good, the kindness, in making this 
poor bird flutter still with hope against the bars, 
when fast prison had so surely closed in round her? 
But what else could we do? We could not give 
her those glib assurances that naive souls make 
so easily to others concerning their after state. 

Secretly, I think, we knew that her philosophy 
of calm reality, that queer and unbidden growing 
tranquillity which precedes death, was nearer to 
our own belief, than would be any gilt-edged ortho- 
doxy; but nevertheless (such is the strength of 
what is expected), we felt it dreadful that we could 
not console her with the ordinary presumptions. 

"You mustn't give up hope, " we kept on sa3dng: 
"The new doctor will do a lot for you; he's a 
speciaHst — a very clever man." 

And she kept on answering : " Yes, sir. " " Yes, 
ma'am." But still her eyes went on asking, as 
if there were something else she wanted. And 
then to one of us came an inspiration : 

116 



GONE 

"You mustn't let your husband worry about 
expense. That will be all right. " 

She smiled then, as if the chief cloud on her soul 
had been the thought of the arrears her illness and 
death would leave weighing on him with whom she 
had shared this bed ten years and more. And 
with that smile warming the memory of those 
spirit-haunted eyes, we crept down-stairs again, 
and out into the fields. 

It was more beautiful than ever, just touched 
already with evening mystery — it was better than 
ever to be alive. And the immortal wonder that 
has haunted man since first he became man, and 
haunts, I think, even the animals — the unanswer- 
able question, why joy and beauty must ever be 
walking hand in hand with ugliness and pain — 
haunted us across those fields of life and loveliness. 
It was all right, no doubt, even reasonable, since 
without dark there is no light. It was part of 
that unending sum whose answer is not given; the 
merest little swing of the great pendulum! And 
yet — ! To accept this violent contrast without 
a sigh of revolt, without a question! No sirs, it 
was not so jolly as all that! That she should be 
dying there at thirty, of a creeping malady which 
she might have checked, perhaps, if she had not 
had too many things to do for the children and 

117 



CONCERNING LIFE 

husband; to do anything for herself — if she had not 
been forced to hold the creed: Be healthy, or die! 
This was no doubt perfectly explicable and in 
accordance with the Supreme Equation; yet we, 
enjoying life, and health, and ease of money, felt 
horror and revolt on this evening of such beauty. 
Nor at the moment did we derive great comfort 
from the thought that life slips in and out of 
sheath, like sun-sparks on water, and that of all 
the cloud of summer midges dancing in the last 
gleam, not one would be alive to-morrow. 

It was three evenings later that we heard un- 
certain footfalls on the flagstones of the verandah, 
then a sort of brushing sound against the wood of 
the long, open window. Drawing aside the cur- 
tain, one of us looked out. Herd was standing 
there in the bright moonlight, bareheaded, with 
roughened hair. He came in, and seeming not to 
know quite where he went, took stand by the 
hearth, and putting up his dark hand, gripped 
the mantelshelf. Then, as if recollecting himself, 
he said: "Gude evenin', sir; beg pardon, M'm." 
No more for a full minute; but his hand, taking 
some little china thing, turned it over and over 
without ceasing, and down his broken face tears 
ran. Then, very suddenly, he said: "She's 
gone. " And his hand turned over and over that 

118 



GONE 

little china thing, and the tears went on rolling 
down. Then, stumbling, and swaying like a man 
in drink, he made his way out again into the 
moonhght. We watched him across the lawn 
and path, and through the gate, till his footfalls 
died out there in the field, and his figure was 
lost in the black shadow of the holly hedge. 

And the night was so beautiful, so utterly, 
glamourously beautiful, with its star-flowers, and 
its silence, and its trees clothed in moonhght. 
All was tranquil as a dream of sleep. But it was 
long before our hearts, wandering with poor Herd, 
would let us remember that she had slipped away 
into so beautiful a dream. 

The dead do not suffer from their rest in beauty. 
But the living ! 

1911. 



119 



THRESHING 

WHEN the drone of the thresher breaks 
through the autumn sighing of trees and 
wind, or through that stillness of the first frost, I 
get restless and more restless, till, throwing down 
my pen, I have gone out to see. For there is 
nothing like the sight of threshing for making one 
feel good — not in the sense of comfort, but at 
heart. There, under the pines and the already 
leafless elms and beech-trees, close to the great 
stacks, is the big, busy creature, with its small 
black puffing engine astern ; and there, all around 
it, is that conglomeration of unsentimental labour 
which invests all the crises of farm work with such 
fascination. The crew of the farm is only five all 
told, but to-day they are fifteen, and none stran- 
gers, save the owners of the travelling thresher. 

They are working without respite and with 
little speech, not at all as if they had been brought 
together for the benefit of some one else's corn, 
but as though they, one and all, had a private 
grudge against Time and a personal pleasure in 
finishing this job, which, while it lasts, is bringing 

120 



THRESHING 

them extra pay and most excellent free feeding. 
Just as after a dilatory voyage a crew will brace 
themselves for the rmi in, recording with sudden 
energy their consciousness of triumph over the 
elements, so on a farm the harvests of hay and 
corn, sheep-shearing, and threshing will bring out 
in all a common sentiment, a kind of sporting 
energy, a defiant spurt, as it were, to score off 
Nature; for it is only a philosopher here and 
there among them, I think, who sees that Nature 
is eager to be scored off in this fashion, being anx- 
ious that some one should eat her kindly fruits. 

With ceremonial as grave as that which is at 
work within the thresher itself, the tasks have been 
divided. At the root of all things, pitchforking 
from the stack, stands the farmer, moustached, 
and always upright — was he not in the Yeomanr}^? 
— dignified in a hard black hat, no waistcoat, and 
his working coat so ragged that it would never 
cling to him but for pure affection. Between him 
and the body of the machine are five more pitch- 
forks, directing the pale flood of raw material. 
There, amongst them, is poor Herd, still so sad 
from his summer loss, plodding doggedly away. 
To watch him even now makes one feel how terri- 
ble is that dumb grief which has never learned to 
moan. And there is George Yeoford, almost too 

121 



CONCERNING LIFE 

sober; and Murdon plying his pitchfork with a 
supernatural regularity that cannot quite dim his 
queer brigand's face of dark, soft gloom shot with 
sudden humours, his soft, dark corduroys and 
battered hat. Occasionally he stops, and taking 
off that hat, wipes his corrugated brow under 
black hair, and seems to brood over his own regu- 
larity. 

Down here, too, where I stand, each separate 
function of the thresher has its appointed slave. 
Here Cedric rakes the chaff pouring from the side 
down into the chaff-shed. Carting the straw 
that streams from the thresher bows, are Michel- 
more and Neck — the little man who cannot read, 
but can milk and whistle the hearts out of his 
cows till they follow him like dogs. At the thresh- 
er's stern is Morris, the driver, selected because of 
that utter reliability which radiates from his 
broad, handsome face. His part is to attend the 
sacking of the three kinds of grain for ever sieving 
out. He murmurs: "Busy work, sir!" and opens 
a httle door to show me how "the machinery does 
it all, " holding a sack between his knees and some 
string in his white teeth. Then away goes the 
sack — four bushels, one hundred and sixty pounds 
of "genuines, seconds, or seed" — wheeled by 
Cedric on a little trolley thing, to where George- 

122 



THRESHING 

the-Gaul or Jim-the-Early-Saxon is waiting to 
bear it on his back up the stone steps into the 
corn-chamber. 

It has been raining in the night; the ground is a 
churn of straw and mud, and the trees still drip; 
but now there is sunlight, a sweet air, and clear 
sky, wine-coloured through the red, naked, beech- 
twigs tipped with white untimely buds. Nothing 
can be more lovely than this late autumn day, so 
still, save for the droning of the thresher and the 
constant tinny chuckle of the grey, thin-headed 
Guinea-fowl, driven by this business away from 
their usual haunts. 

And soon the feeling that I knew would come 
begins creeping over me, the sense of an extraor- 
dinary sanity in this never-ceasing harmonious 
labour pursued in the autumn air faintly perfumed 
with wood-smoke, with the scent of chaff, and 
whiffs from that black puffing-Billy; the sense that 
there is nothing between this clean toil — not too 
hard but hard enough — and the clean consumption 
of its clean results; the sense that nobody except 
myself is in the least conscious of how sane it all 
is. The brains of these sane ones are all too busy 
with the real affairs of life, the disposition of their 
wages, anticipation of dinner, some girl, some 
junketing, some wager, the last rifle match, and, 

123 



CONCERNING LIFE 

more than all, with that pleasant rhythmic noth- 
ingness, companion of the busy swing and play of 
muscles, which of all states is secretly most akin 
to the deep unconsciousness of life itself. Thus 
to work in the free air for the good of all and the 
hurt of none, without worry or the breath of acri- 
mony — surely no phase of human Hfe so nears the 
life of the truly civilised community — the life of 
a hive of bees. Not one of these working so sanely 
— unless it be Morris, who will spend his Sunday 
afternoon on some high rock just watching sun- 
light and shadow drifting on the moors — not one, 
I think, is distraught by perception of his own 
sanity, by knowledge of how near he is to Harmony, 
not even by appreciation of the still radiance of 
this day, or its innumerable fine shades of colour. 
It is all work, and no moody consciousness — all 
work, and will end in sleep. 

I leave them soon, and make my way up the 
stone steps to the "corn chamber," where tran- 
quillity is crowned. In the whitewashed room 
the corn lies in drifts and ridges, three to four feet 
deep, all silvery-dun, like some remote sand des- 
ert, lifeless beneath the moon. Here it hes, and 
into it, staggering under the sacks, George-the- 
Gaul and Jim-the-Early-Saxon tramp up to their 
knees, spill the sacks over their heads, and out 

124 



THRESHING 

again; and above where their feet have plunged 
the patient surface closes again, smooth. And as 
I stand there in the doorway, looking at that 
silvery corn drift, I think of the whole process, 
from seed sown to the last sieving into this tran- 
quil resting-place. I think of the slow, dogged 
ploughman, with the crows above him on the wind ; 
of the swing of the sower's arm, dark up against 
grey sky on the steep field. I think of the seed 
snug-burrowing for safety, and its mysterious 
ferment under the warm Spring rain, of the soft 
green shoots tapering up so shyly toward the first 
sun, and hardening in air to thin wiry stalk. I 
think of the unnumerable tiny beasts that have 
jungled in that pale forest; of the winged blue 
jewels of butterfly risen from it to hover on the 
wild-rustling blades; of that continual music 
played there by the wind; of the chicory and poppy 
flowers that have been its lights-o'-love, as it grew 
tawny and full of fife, before the appointed date 
when it should return to its captivity. I think 
of that slow-travelling hum and swish which laid 
it low, of the gathering to stack, and the long wait- 
ing under the rustle and drip of the sheltering 
trees, until yesterday the hoot of the thresher 
blew, and there began the falling into this dun 
silvery peace. Here it will lie with the pale sun 

125 



CONCERNING LIFE 

narrowly filtering in on it, and by night the pale 
moon, till slowly, week by week, it is stolen away, 
and its ridges and drifts sink and sink, and the 
beasts have eaten it all. . . . 

When the dusk is falling, I go out to them again. 
They have nearly finished now; the chaff in the 
chaff-shed is mounting hillock-high; only the 
little barley stack remains unthreshed. Mrs. 
George-the-Gaul is standing with a jug to give 
drink to the tired ones. Some stars are already 
netted in the branches of the pines; the Guinea- 
fowl are silent. But still the harmonious thresher 
hums and showers from three sides the straw, the 
chaff, the corn; and the men fork, and rake, and 
cart, and carry, sleep growing in their muscles, 
silence on their tongues, and the tranquillity of 
the long day nearly ended in their souls. They 
will go on till it is quite dark. 

1911. ] 



126 



THAT OLD-TIME PLACE 

"^VT'ES, suh — here we are at that old-time 

A place!" And our dark driver drew up his 
little victoria gently. 

Through the open doorway, into a dim, cavern- 
ous, ruined house of New Orleans we passed. The 
mildew and dirt, the dark denuded dankness of 
that old hostel, rotting down with damp and time! 

And our guide, the tall, thin, grey-haired dame, 
who came forward with such native ease and moved 
before us, touching this fungused wall, that rusting 
stairway, and telling, as it were, no one in her 
soft, slow speech, things that any one could see — ■ 
what a strange and fitting figure ! 

Before the smell of the deserted, oozing rooms, 
before that old creature leading us on and on, 
negligent of all our questions, and talking to the 
air, as though we were not, we felt such discom- 
fort that we soon made to go out again into such 
freshness as there was on that day of dismal heat. 
Then realising, it seemed, that she was losing us, 
our old guide turned ; for the first time looking in 
our faces, she smiled, and said in her sweet, weak 
voice, like the sound from the strings of a spinet 

127 



CONCERNING LIFE 

long unplayed on: "Don' you wahnd to see the 
dome-room : an' all the other rooms right here, of 
this old-time place?" 

Again those words! We had not the hearts to 
disappoint her. And as we followed on and on, 
along the mouldering corridors and rooms where 
the black peeling papers hung like stalactites, the 
dominance of our senses gradually dropped from 
us, and with our souls we saw its soul — the soul of 
this old-time place; this mustering house of the 
old South, bereft of all but ghosts and the grey 
pigeons niched in the rotting gallery round a nar- 
row courtyard open to the sky. 

"This is the dome-room, suh and lady; right 
over the slave-market it is. Here they did the 
business of the State — sure; old-time heroes up 
there in the roof — Washington, Hamilton, Jeffer- 
son, Davis, Lee — there they are! All gone — 
now! Yes, suh!" 

A fine — ^yea, even a splendid room, of great 
height, and carved grandeur, with hand-wrought 
bronze sconces and a band of metal bordering, 
all blackened with oblivion. And the faces of 
those old heroes encircling that domed ceiling 
were blackened too, and scarred with damp, be- 
yond recognition. Here, beneath their gaze, men 
had banqueted and danced and ruled. The pride 

128 



THAT OLD-TIME PLACE 

and might and vivid strength of things still 
fluttered their uneasy flags of spirit, moved dis- 
herited wings! Those old-time feasts and grave 
discussions — we seemed to see them printed on the 
thick air, imprisoned in this great chamber built 
above their dark foundations. The pride and the 
might and the vivid strength of things — ^gone, all 
gone! 

We became conscious again of that soft, weak 
voice. 

"Not hearing very well, suh,I have it all printed, 
lady — beautifully told here — yes, indeed!" 

She was putting cards into our hands; then, 
impassive, maintaining ever her impersonal chant, 
the guardian of past glory led us on. 

"Now we shall see the slave-market — down- 
stairs, underneath! It's wet for the lady — the 
water comes in now — ^yes, suh!" 

On the crumbling black and white marble floor- 
ings the water indeed was trickling into pools. 
And down in the halls there came to us wandering 
— strangest thing that ever strayed through de- 
serted grandeur — a brown, broken horse, lean, 
with a sore flank and a head of tremendous age. 
It stopped and gazed at us, as though we might be 
going to give it things to eat, then passed on, 
stumbling over the ruined marbles. For a mo- 

129 



CONCERNING LIFE 

ment we had thought him ghost — one of the many. 
But he was not, since his hoofs sounded. The 
scrambhng clatter of them had died out into si- 
lence before we came to that dark, crypt-hke cham- 
ber whose marble columns were ringed in iron, 
veritable pillars of foundation. And then we saw 
that our old guide's hands were full of newspapers. 
She struck a match; they caught fire and blazed. 
Holding high that torch, she said: "See! Up 
there's his name, above where he stood. The 
auctioneer. Oh yes, indeed! Here's where they 
sold them!" 

Below that name, decaying on the wall, we had 
the slow, uncanny feeling of some one standing 
there in the gleam and flicker from that paper 
torch. For a moment the whole shadowy room 
seemed full of forms and faces. Then the torch 
died out, and our old guide, pointing through an 
archway with the blackened stump of it, said: 
"'Twas here they kept them — indeed, yes!" 
We saw before us a sort of vault, stone-built, and 
low, and long. The light there was too dim for 
us to make out anything but walls and heaps of 
rusting scrap-iron cast away there and mouldering 
down. But trying to pierce that darkness we be- 
came conscious, as it seemed, of innumerable eyes 
gazing, not at us, but through the archway where 

130 



THAT OLD-TIME PLACE 

we stood; innumerable white eyeballs gleaming 
out of blackness. From behind us came a little 
laugh. It floated past through the archway, 
toward those eyes. Who was that? Who laughed 
in there? The old South itself — that incredible, 
fine, lost soul! That "old-time" thing of old 
ideals, blindfolded by its own history! That 
queer proud blend of simple chivalry and tyranny, 
of piety and the abhorrent thing! Who was it 
laughed there in the old slave-market — ^laughed at 
these white eyeballs glaring from out of the black- 
ness of their dark cattle-pen? What poor departed 
soul in this House of Melancholy? But there was 
no ghost when we turned to look — only our old 
guide with her sweet smile. 

"Yes, suh. Here they all came — 'twas the 
finest hotel — before the war-time; old Southern 
families — buyin' an' sellin' their property. Yes, 
ma'am, very interesting! This way! And here 
were the bells to all the rooms. Broken, you see — 
aU broken!" 

And rather quickly we passed away, out of that 
"old-time place"; where something had laughed, 
and the drip, drip, drip of water down the walls 
was as the sound of a spirit grieving. 

1912. 

131 



ROMANCE— THREE GLEAMS 



ON that New Year's morning when I drew up 
the blind it was still nearly dark, but for 
the faintest pink flush glancing out there on the 
horizon of black water. The far shore of the river's 
mouth was just soft dusk; and the dim trees be- 
low me were in perfect stillness. There was no 
lap of water. And then — I saw her, drifting in on 
the tide — the little ship, passaging below me, a 
happy ghost. Like no thing of this world she 
came, ending her flight, with sail-wings closing and 
her glowing lantern eyes. There was I know not 
what of stealthy joy about her thus creeping in to 
the unexpecting land. And I wished she would 
never pass, but go on gliding by down there for ever 
with her dark ropes, and her bright lanterns, and 
her mysterious felicity, so that I might have for 
ever in my heart the blessed feeling she brought 
me, coming like this out of that great mystery the 
sea. If only she need not change to solidity, but 
ever be this visitor from the unknown, this sacred 
bird, telling with her half-seen, trailing-down 
plume-sails the story of uncharted wonder. If 

132 



ROMANCE— THREE GLEAMS 

only I might go on trembling, as I was, with the 
rapture of all I did not know and could not see, 
yet felt pressing against me and touching my face 
with its lips! To think of her at anchor in cold 
light was like flinging-to a door in the face of happi- 
ness. And just then she struck her bell; the faint 
silvery far-down sound fled away before her, and 
to every side, out into the utter hush, to discover 
echo. But nothing answered, as if fearing to 
break the spell of her coming, to brush with reality 
the dark sea dew from her sail-wings. But within 
me, in response, there began the song of all un- 
known things; the song so tenuous, so ecstatic, 
that seems to sweep and quiver across such thin 
golden strings, and like an eager dream dies too 
soon. The song of the secret-knowing wind that 
has peered through so great forests and over such 
wild sea; blown on so many faces, and in the jun- 
gles of the grass — the song of all that the wind has 
seen and felt. The song of lives that I should 
never Hve; of the loves that I should never love — 
singing to me as though I should! And suddenly 
I felt that I could not bear my little ship of dreams 
to grow hard and grey, her bright lanterns drowned 
in the cold light, her dark ropes spidery and taut, 
her sea-wan sails all furled, and she no more en- 
chanted; and turning away I let fall the curtain. 

133 



CONCERNING LIFE 

II 

Then what happens to the moon? She, who, 
shy and veiled, shps out before dusk to take the 
air of heaven, wandering timidly among the col- 
umned clouds, and fugitive from the staring of 
the sun ; she, who, when dusk has come, rules the 
sentient night with such chaste and icy spell — 
whither and how does she retreat? 

I came on her one morning — I surprised her. 
She was stealing into a dark wintry wood, and five 
little stars were chasing her. She was orange- 
hooded, a light-o'-love dismissed — unashamed and 
unfatigued, having taken all. And she was look- 
ing back with her almond eyes, across her dark- 
ivory shoulder, at Night where he still lay drowned 
in the sleep she had brought him. What a strange, 
slow, mocking look! So might Aphrodite herself 
have looked back at some weary lover, remem- 
bering the fire of his first embrace. Insatiate, 
smiling creature, slipping down to the rim of the 
world to her bath in the sweet waters of dawn, 
whence emerging, pure as a water lily, she would 
float in the cool sky till evening came again! 
And just then she saw me looking, and hid be- 
hind a holm-oak tree; but I could still see the 
gleam of one shoulder and her long narrow eyes 

134 



ROMANCE— THREE GLEAMS 

pursuing me. I went up to the tree and parted 
its dark boughs to take her; but she had sHpped 
behind another. I called to her to stand; if only 
for one moment. But she smiled and went slip- 
ping on, and I ran thrusting through the wet 
bushes, leaping the fallen trunks. The scent of 
rotting leaves disturbed by my feet leaped out 
into the darkness, and birds, surprised, fluttered 
away. And still I ran — she slipping ever further 
into the grove, and ever looking back at me. And 
I thought: But I will catch you yet, you nymph 
of perdition! The wood will soon be passed, you 
will have no cover then ! And from her eyes, and 
the scanty gleam of her flying limbs, I never looked 
away, not even when I stumbled or ran against 
tree trunks in my bhnd haste. And at every clear- 
ing I flew more furiously, thinking to seize all of 
her with my gaze before she could cross the glade; 
but ever she found some little low tree, some bush 
of birch ungrown, or the far top branches of the 
next grove to screen her flying body and preserve 
allurement. And all the time she was dipping, 
dipping to the rim of the world. And then I 
tripped; but, as I rose, I saw that she had lin- 
gered for me; her long sliding eyes were fuU, it 
seemed to me, of pity, as if she would have hked 
for me to have enjoyed the sight of her. I stood 

135 



CONCERNING LIFE 

still, breathless, thinking that at last she would 
consent; but flinging back, up into the air, one 
dark-ivory arm, she sighed and vanished. And 
the breath of her sigh stirred all the birch-tree 
twigs just coloured with the dawn. Long I stood 
in that thicket gazing at the spot where she had 
leapt from me over the edge of the world — my 
heart quivering. 

Ill 

We embarked on the estuary steamer that win- 
ter morning just as daylight came full. The sun 
was on the wing scattering little white clouds, as 
an eagle might scatter doves. They scurried up 
before him with their broken feathers tipped and 
tinged with gold. In the air was a touch of frost, 
and a smoky mist-drift clung here and there above 
the reeds, blurring the shores of the lagoon so that 
we seemed to be steaming across boundless water, 
till some clump of trees would fling its top out of 
the fog, then fall back into whiteness. 

And then, in that thick vapour, rounding I sup- 
pose some curve, we came suddenly into we knew 
not what — all white and moving it was, as if the 
mist were crazed; murmuring, too, with a sort of 
restless beating. We seemed to be passing through 
a ghost — the ghost of all the life that had sprung 

136 



ROMANCE— THREE GLEAMS 

from this water and its shores; we seemed to 
have left reahty, to be travelHng through Hve 
wonder. 

And the fantastic thought sprang into my mind : 
I have died. This is the voyage of my soul in the 
wild. I am in the final wilderness of spirits — lost 
in the ghost robe that wraps the earth. There 
seemed in all this white murmuration to be mill- 
ions of tiny hands stretching out to me, millions 
of whispering voices, of wistful eyes. I had no 
fear, but a curious baffled eagerness, the strangest 
feeling of having lost myself and become part of 
this around me; exactly as if my own hands and 
voice and eyes had left me and were groping, and 
whispering, and gazing out there in the eeriness. 
I was no longer a man on an estuary steamer, but 
part of sentient ghostliness. Nor did I feel un- 
happy; it seemed as though I had never been any- 
thing but this Bedouin spirit wandering. 

We passed through again into the stillness of 
plain mist, and all those eerie sensations went, 
leaving nothing but curiosity to know what this 
was that we had traversed. Then suddenly the 
sun came flaring out, and we saw behind us thou- 
sands and thousands of white gulls dipping, wheel- 
ing, brushing the water with their wings, bewitched 
with sun and mist. That was all. And yet — 

137 



CONCERNING LIFE 

that white-winged legion through whom we had 
ploughed our way were not, could never be, to me 
just guUs — ^there was more than mere sun-glamour 
gilding their misty plumes ; there was the wizardry 
of my past wonder, the enchantment of romance. 

1912. 



138 



MEMORIES 

WE set out to meet him at Waterloo Station 
on a dull day of February — I, who had 
owned his impetuous mother, knowing a Httle 
what to expect, while to my companion he would 
be all original. We stood there waiting (for the 
Salisbury train was late), and wondering with a 
warm, half-fearful eagerness what sort of new 
thread Life was going to twine into our skein. I 
think our chief dread was that he might have light 
eyes — those yellow Chinese eyes of the common, 
parti-coloured spaniel. And each new minute of 
the train's tardiness increased our anxious com- 
passion: His first journey; his first separation 
from his mother; this black two-months' baby! 
Then the train ran in, and we hastened to look for 
him. "Have you a dog for us?" 

"A dog! Not in this van. Ask the rear- 
guard. " 

"Have you a dog for us?" 

"That's right. From Salisbury. Here's your 
wild beast, sir!" 

From behind a wooden crate we saw a long black 
139 



CONCERNING LIFE 

muzzled nose poking round at uS; and heard a 
faint hoarse whimpering. 

I remember my first thought : 

"Isn't his nose too long?" 

But to my companion's heart it went at once, 
because it was swollen from crying and being 
pressed against things that he could not see 
through. We took him out — soft, wobbly, tear- 
ful; set him down on his four, as yet not quite 
simultaneous legs, and regarded liim. Or, rather, 
my companion did, having her head on one side, 
and a quavering smile; and I regarded her, knowing 
that I should thereby get a truer impression of him. 

He wandered a little round our legs, neither 
wagging his tail nor licking at our hands; then he 
looked up, and my companion said: "He's an 
angel!" 

I was not so certain. He seemed hammer- 
headed, with no eyes at all, and little connection 
between his head, his body, and his legs. His 
ears were very long, as long as his poor nose ; and 
gleaming down in the blackness of him I could see 
the same white star that disgraced his mother's 
chest. 

Picking him up, we carried him to a four-wheeled 
cab, and took his muzzle off. His little dark- 
brown eyes were resolutely fixed on distance, and 

140 



MEMORIES 

by his refusal to even smell the biscuits we had 
brought to make him happy, we knew that the 
human being had not yet come into a life that had 
contained so far only a mother, a wood-shed, and 
four other soft, wobbly, black, hammer-headed 
angels, smelling of themselves, and warmth, and 
wood shavings. It was pleasant to feel that to us 
he would surrender an untouched love, that is, 
if he would surrender anything. Suppose he did 
not take to us! 

And just then something must have stirred in 
him, for he turned up his swollen nose and stared 
at my companion, and a little later rubbed the 
dry pinkness of his tongue against my thumb. In 
that look, and that unconscious restless lick, he 
was trying hard to leave unhappiness behind, try- 
ing hard to feel that these new creatures with 
stroking paws and queer scents, were his mother; 
yet all the time he knew, I am sure, that they were 
something bigger, more permanently, desperately, 
his. The first sense of being owned, perhaps 
(who knows) of owning, had stirred in him. He 
would never again be quite the same unconscious 
creature. 

A little way from the end of our journey we got 
out and dismissed the cab. He could not too soon 
know the scents and pavements of this London 

141 



CONCERNING LIFE 

where the chief of his life must pass. I can see 
now his first bumble down that wide, back-water 
of a street, how continually and suddenly he sat 
down to make sure of his own legs, how con- 
tinually he lost our heels. He showed us then in 
full perfection what was afterwards to be an incon- 
venient — if endearing — characteristic : At any call 
or whistle he would look in precisely the opposite 
direction. How many times all through his life 
have I not seen him, at my whistle, start violently 
and turn his tail to me, then, with nose thrown 
searchingly from side to side, begin to canter 
toward the horizon! 

In that first walk, we met, fortunately, but one 
vehicle, a brewer's dray; he chose that moment to 
attend to the more serious affairs of life, sitting 
quietly before the horses' feet and requiring to be 
moved by hand. From the beginning he had his 
dignity, and was extremely difficult to lift, owing 
to the length of his middle distance. 

What strange feelings must have stirred in his 
little white soul when he first smelled carpet! 
But it was all so strange to him that day — I doubt 
if he felt more than I did when I first travelled to 
my private school, reading "Tales of a Grand- 
father," and phed with tracts and sherry by my 
father's man of business. 

142 



MEMORIES 

That night, indeed, for several nights, he slept 
with me, keeping me too warm down my back, 
and waking me now and then with quaint sleepy- 
whimperings. Indeed, all through his life he flew 
a good deal in his sleep, fighting dogs and seeing 
ghosts, running after rabbits and thrown sticks; 
and to the last one never quite knew whether or 
no to rouse him when his four black feet began to 
jerk and quiver. His dreams were like our dreams, 
both good and bad ; happy sometimes, sometimes 
tragic to weeping point. 

He ceased to sleep with me the day we discovered 
that he was a perfect little colony, whose settlers 
were of an active species which I have never seen 
again. After that he had many beds, for circum- 
stance ordained that his life should be nomadic, 
and it is to this I trace that philosophic indiffer- 
ence to place or property, which marked him out 
from most of his own kind. He learned early 
that for a black dog with long silky ears, a feath- 
ered tail, and head of great dignity, there was no 
home whatsoever, away from those creatures with 
special scents, who took Hberties with his name, 
and alone of all created things were privileged to 
smack him with a sHpper. He would sleep any- 
where, so long as it was in their room, or so 
close outside it as to make no matter, for it was 

143 



CONCERNING LIFE 

with him a principle that what he did not smell 
did not exist. I woiild I could hear again those 
long rubber-Hpped snufflings of recognition under- 
neath the door, with which each morning he would 
regale and reassure a spirit that grew with age 
more and more nervous and delicate about this 
matter of propinquity! For he was a dog of 
fixed ideas, things stamped on his mind were ' 
indehble; as, for example, his duty toward cats, 
for whom he had really a perverse affection, which 
had led to that first disastrous moment of his life, 
when he was brought up, poor bewildered puppy, 
from a brief excursion to the kitchen, with one eye 
closed and his cheek torn ! He bore to his grave 
that jagged scratch across the eye. It was in 
dread of a repetition of this tragedy that he was 
instructed at the word "Cats" to rush forward 
with a special "tow-row-rowing," which he never 
used toward any other form of creature. To the 
end he cherished a hope that he would reach the 
cat, but never did; and if he had, we knew he 
would only have stood and wagged his tail; but 
I well remember once, when he returned, impor- 
tant, from some such sally, how dreadfully my 
companion startled a cat-loving friend by murmur- 
ing in her most honeyed voice : " Well, my darling, 
have you been killing pussies in the garden? " 

144 



MEMORIES 

His eye and nose were impeccable in their sense 
of form ; indeed, he was very Enghsh in that matter : 
People must be just so; things smell properly; 
and affairs go on in the one right way. He could 
tolerate neither creatures in ragged clothes, nor 
children on their hands and knees, nor postmen, 
because, with their bags, they swelled-up on 
one side, and carried lanterns on their stomachs. 
He would never let the harmless creatures pass 
without religious barks. Naturally a believer in 
authority and routine, and distrusting spiritual 
adventure, he yet had curious fads that seemed 
to have nested in him, quite outside of all prin- 
ciple. He would, for instance, follow neither car- 
riages nor horses, and if we tried to make him, 
at once left for home, where he would sit with nose 
raised to Heaven, emitting through it a most lugu- 
brious, shrill noise. Then again, one must not 
place a stick, a slipper, a glove, or anything with 
which he could play, upon one's head — since such 
an action reduced him at once to frenzy. For so 
conservative a dog, his environment was sadly 
anarchistic. He never complained in words of 
our shifting habits, but curled his head round over 
his left paw and pressed his chin very hard against 
the ground whenever he smelled packing. What 
necessity, — he seemed continually to be saying, — 

145 



CONCERNING LIFE 

what real necessity is there for change of any kind 
whatever? Here we were all together, and one 
day was like another, so that I knew where I was 
— and now you only know what will happen next; 
and / — I can't tell you whether I shall be with you 
when it happens ! What strange, grieving minutes 
a dog passes at such times in the underground of 
his subconsciousness, refusing realisation, yet all 
the time only too well divining. Some careless 
word, some unmuted compassion in voice, the 
stealthy wrapping of a pair of boots, the unaccus- 
tomed shutting of a door that ought to be open, 
the removal from a down-stair room of an object 
always there — one tiny thing, and he knows for 
certain that he is not going too. He fights against 
the knowledge just as we do against what we can- 
not bear; he gives up hope, but not effort, protest- 
ing in the only way he knows of, and now and then 
heaving a great sigh. Those sighs of a dog ! They 
go to the heart so much more deeply than the 
sighs of our own kind, because they are utterly 
unintended, regardless of effect, emerging from 
one who, heaving them, knows not that they 
have escaped him! 

The words: "Yes — going too!" spoken in a cer- 
tain tone, would call up in his eyes a still-question- 
ing half-happiness, and from his tail a quiet flutter, 

146 



MEMORIES 

but did not quite serve to put to rest either his 
doubt or his feehng that it was all unnecessary — 
until the cab arrived. Then he would pour him- 
self out of door or window, and be found in the 
bottom of the vehicle, looking severely away from 
an admiring cabman. Once settled on our feet he 
travelled with philosophy, but no digestion. 

I think no dog was ever more indifferent to an 
outside world of human creatures; yet few dogs 
have made more conquests — especially among 
strange women, through whom, however, he had 
a habit of looking — very discouraging. He had, 
natheless, one or two particular friends, such as 
him to whom this book is dedicated, and a few 
persons whom he knew he had seen before, but, 
broadly speaking, there were in his worldof men, 
only his mistress, and — the almighty. 

Each August, till he was six, he was sent for 
health, and the assuagement of his hereditary in- 
stincts, up to a Scotch shooting, where he carried 
many birds in a very tender manner. Once he 
was compelled by Fate to remain there nearly a 
year; and we went up ourselves to fetch him home. 
Down the long avenue toward the keeper's cottage 
we walked. It was high autumn ; there had been 
frost already, for the ground was fine with red and 
yellow leaves; and presently we saw himself com- 

147 



CONCERNING LIFE 

ing, professionally questing among those leaves, 
and preceding his dear keeper with the business- 
like self-containment of a sportsman ; not too fat, 
glossy as a raven's wing, swinging his ears and 
sporran like a little Highlander. We approached 
him silently. Suddenly his nose went up from its 
imagined trail, and he came rushing at our legs. 
From him, as a garment drops from a man, 
dropped all his strange soberness; he became in a 
single instant one fluttering eagerness. He leaped 
from life to life in one bound, without hesitation, 
without regret. Not one sigh, not one look back, 
not the faintest token of gratitude or regret at 
leaving those good people who had tended him for 
a whole year, buttered oat-cake for him, allowed 
him to choose each night exactly where he would 
sleep. No, he just marched out beside us, as 
close as ever he could get, drawing us on in spirit, 
and not even attending to the scents, until the 
lodge gates were passed. 

It was strictly in accordance with the perversity 
of things, and something in the nature of calamity 
that he had not been ours one year, when there 
came over me a dreadful but overmastering aver- 
sion from killing those birds and creatures of 
which he was so fond as soon as they were dead. 
And so I never knew him as a sportsman; for dur- 

148 



MEMORIES 

ing that first year he was only an unbroken puppy, 
tied to my waist for fear of accidents, and carefully 
pulling me off every shot. They tell me he de- 
veloped a lovely nose and perfect mouth, large 
enough to hold gingerly the biggest hare. I well 
believe it, remembering the qualities of his mother, 
whose character, however, in stability he far sur- 
passed. But, as he grew every year more devoted 
to dead grouse and birds and rabbits, / liked 
them more and more alive; it was the only real 
breach between us, and we kept it out of sight. 
Ah ! well ; it is consoling to reflect that I should in- 
fallibly have ruined his sporting qualities, lacking 
that peculiar habit of meaning what one says, so 
necessary to keep dogs virtuous. But surely to 
have had him with me, quivering and alert, with 
his solemn, eager face, would have given a new 
joy to those crisp mornings when the hope of wings 
coming to the gun makes poignant in the sports- 
man as nothing else will, an almost sensual love 
of Nature, a fierce delight in the soft glow of leaves, 
in the white birch stems and tracery of sparse 
twigs against blue sky, in the scents of sap and 
grass and gum and heather flowers ; stivers the hair 
of him with keenness for interpreting each sound, 
and fills the very fern or moss he kneels on, the 
very trunk he leans against, with strange vibration. 

149 



CONCERNING LIFE 

Slowly Fate prepares for each of us the religion 
that lies coiled in our most secret nerves; with such 
we cannot trifle, we do not even try! But how 
shall a man grudge any one sensations he has so 
keenly felt? Let such as have never known those 
curious delights, uphold the hand of horror — for 
me there can be no such luxury. If I could, I 
would still perhaps be knowing them; but when 
once the joy of life in those winged and furry 
things has knocked at the very portals of one's 
spirit, the thought that by pressing a little iron 
twig one will rive that joy out of their vitals, is 
too hard to bear. Call it sestheticism, squeamish- 
ness, namby-pamby sentimentalism, what you 
will — it is stronger than oneself! 

Yes, after one had once watched with an eye 
that did not merely see, the thirsty gaping of a 
slowly dying bird, or a rabbit dragging a broken 
leg to a hole where he would lie for hours thinking 
of the fern to which he should never more come 
forth — after that, there was always the following 
little matter of arithmetic: Given, that all those 
who had been shooting were "good-fair" shots — 
which, Heaven knew, they never were — they yet 
missed one at least in four, and did not miss it 
very much; so that if seventy-five things were 
slain, there were also twenty-five that had been 

150 



MEMORIES 

fired at, and, of those twenty-five, twelve and a 
half had "gotten it" somewhere in their bodies, 
and would "likely" die at their great leisure. 

This was the sum that brought about the only 
cleavage in our lives; and so, as he grew older, and 
trying to part from each other we no longer could, 
he ceased going to Scotland. But after that I 
often felt, and especially when we heard guns, how 
the best and most secret instincts of him were 
being stifled. But what was to be done? In that 
which was left of a clay pigeon he would take not 
the faintest interest — the scent of it was paltiy. 
Yet always, even in his most cosseted and idle 
days, he managed to preserve the grave preoccu- 
pation of one professionally concerned with re- 
trieving things that smell; and consoled himself 
with pastimes such as cricket, which he played in 
a manner highly speciahsed, following the ball up 
the moment it left the bowler's hand, and some- 
times retrieving it before it reached the batsman. 
When remonstrated with, he would consider a 
little, hanging out a pink tongue and looking 
rather too eagerly at the ball, then canter slowly 
out to a sort of forward short leg. Why he always 
chose that particular position it is diSicult to 
say; possibly he could lurk there better than any- 
where else, the batsman's eye not being on him, 

151 



CONCERNING LIFE 

and the bowler's not too much. As a fieldsman 
he was perfect; but for an occasional belief that 
he was not merely short leg, but slip, point, mid- 
off; and wicket-keep; and perhaps a tendency to 
make the ball a little "jubey." But he worked 
tremendously, watching every movement; for he 
knew the game thoroughly, and seldom delayed it 
more than three minutes when he secured the ball. 
And if that ball were really lost, then indeed he 
took over the proceedings with an intensity and 
quiet vigour that destroyed many shrubs, and the 
solemn satisfaction which comes from being in the 
very centre of the stage. 

But his most passionate delight was swimming 
in anything except the sea, for which, with its un- 
pleasant noise and habit of tasting salt, he had 
little affection. I see him now, cleaving the Ser- 
pentine, with his air of "the world well lost," 
striving to reach my stick before it had touched 
water. Being only a large spaniel, too small for 
mere heroism, he saved no lives in the water but 
his own — and that, on one occasion, before our 
very eyes, from a dark trout stream, which was 
trying to wash him down into a black hole among 
the boulders. 

The call of the wild — Spring running — whatever 
it is — that besets men and dogs, seldom attained 

152 



MEMORIES 

full mastery over him; but one could often see it 
struggling against his devotion to the scent of us, 
and, watching that dumb contest, I have time 
and again wondered how far this civilisation of ours 
was justifiably imposed on him; how far the love 
for us that we had so carefully implanted could 
ever replace in him the satisfaction of his primitive 
wild yearnings. He was like a man, naturally 
polygamous, married to one loved woman. 

It was surely not for nothing that Rover is dog's 
most common name, and would be ours, but for 
our too tenacious fear of losing something, to ad- 
mit, even to ourselves, that we are hankering. 
There was a man who said : Strange that two such 
queerly opposite qualities as courage and hypoc- 
risy are the leading characteristics of the Anglo- 
Saxon! But is not hypocrisy just a product of 
tenacity, which is again the lower part of courage? 
Is not hypocrisy but an active sense of property 
in one's good name, the clutching close of respecta- 
bility at any price, the feeling that one must not 
part, even at the cost of truth, with what he has 
sweated so to gain? And so we Anglo-Saxons will 
not answer to the name of Rover, and treat our 
dogs so that they, too, hardly know their natures. 

The history of his one wandering, for which no 
respectable reason can be assigned, will never, of 

153 



CONCERNING LIFE 

course, be known. It was in London, of an Octo- 
ber evening, when we were told he had sHpped out 
and was not anywhere. Then began those four 
distressful hours of searching for that black needle 
in that blacker bundle of hay. Hours of real dis- 
may and suffering — for it is suffering, indeed, to 
feel a loved thing swallowed up in that hopeless 
maze of London streets. Stolen or run over? 
Which was worst? The neighbouring police sta- 
tions visited, the Dog's Home notified, an order 
for five hundred "Lost Dog" bills placed in the 
printer's hands, the streets patrolled! And then, 
in a lull snatched for food, and still endeavouring 
to preserve some aspect of assurance, we heard 
the bark which meant: "Here is a door I cannot 
open!" We hurried forth, and there he was on 
the top doorstep — busy, unashamed, giving no 
explanations, asking for his supper; and very 
shortly after him came his five hundred "Lost 
Dog" bills. Long I sat looking at him that night 
after my companion had gone up, thinking of the 
evening, some years before, when there followed 
us that shadow of a spaniel who had been lost for 
eleven days. And my heart turned over within me. 
But he! He was asleep, for he knew not remorse. 
Ah ! and there was that other time, when it was 
reported to me, returning home at night, that he 

154 



MEMORIES 

had gone out to find me; and I went forth again, 
disturbed, and whistling his special call to the 
empty fields. Suddenly out of the darkness I 
heard a rushing, and he came furiously dashing 
against my heels from he alone knew where he had 
been lurking and saying to himself: I will not go 
in till he comes! I could not scold, there was 
something too lyrical in the return of that live, 
lonely, rushing piece of blackness through the 
blacker night. After all, the vagary was but a 
variation in his practice when one was away at 
bed-time, of passionately scratching up his bed 
in protest, till it resembled nothing; for, in spite 
of his long and solenm face and the silkiness of 
his ears, there was much in him yet of the cave 
bear — he dug graves on the smallest provocations, 
in which he never buried anything. He was not 
a "clever" dog; and guiltless of all tricks. Nor 
was he ever " shown. " We did not even dream of 
subjecting him to this indignity. Was our dog 
a clown, a hobby, a fad, a fashion, a feather in our 
caps — that we should subject him to periodic 
pennings in stuffy halls, that we should harry his 
faithful soul with such tomfoolery? He never 
j even heard us talk about his lineage, deplore the 
f length of his nose, or call him "clever-looking." 
}- We should have been ashamed to let him smell 

155 



CONCERNING LIFE 

about us the tar-brush of a sense of property, to 
let him think we looked on him as an asset to earn 
us pelf or glory. We wished that there should be 
between us the spirit that was between the sheep- 
dog and that farmer, who, when asked his dog's 
age, touched the old creature's head, and answered 
thus: "Teresa" (his daughter) "was born in 
November, and this one in August. " That sheep- 
dog had seen eighteen years when the great white 
day came for him, and his spirit passed away up, 
to cling with the wood-smoke round the dark 
rafters of the Idtchen where he had lain so vast 
a time beside his master's boots. No, no! If 
a man does not soon pass beyond the thought: 
"By what shall this dog profit me?" into the large 
state of simple gladness to be with dog, he shall 
never know the very essence of that companion- 
ship which depends not on the points of dog, but 
on some strange and subtle mingling of mute 
spirits. For it is by muteness that a dog becomes 
for one so utterly beyond value; with him one is 
at peace, where words play no torturing tricks. 
When he just sits, loving, and knows that he is 
being loved, those are the moments that I think are 
precious to a dog; when, with his adoring soul 
coming through his eyes, he feels that you are 
really thinking of him. But he is touchingly 

156 



MEMORIES 

tolerant of one's other occupations. The subject 
of these memories always knew when one was too 
absorbed in work to be so close to him as he 
thought proper; yet he never tried to hinder or 
distract, or asked for attention. It dinged his 
mood; of course, so that the red under his eyes and 
the folds of his crumply cheeks — which seemed to 
speak of a touch of bloodhound introduced a 
long way back into his breeding — grew deeper and 
more manifest. If he could have spoken at such 
times, he would have said: "I have been a long 
time alone, and I cannot always be asleep; but 
you know best, and I must not criticise. " 

He did not at all mind one's being absorbed in 
other humans; he seemed to enjoy the sounds of 
conversation lifting round him, and to know when 
they were sensible. He could not, for instance, 
stand actors or actresses giving readings of their 
parts, perceiving at once that the same had no 
connection with the minds and real feelings of 
the speakers; and, having wandered a little to 
show his disapproval, he would go to the door and 
stare at it till it opened and let him out. Once 
or twice, it is true, when an actor of large voice 
was declaiming an emotional passage, he so far 
relented as to go up to him and pant in his face. 
Music, too, made him restless, inclined to sigh, and 

157 



CONCERNING LIFE 

to ask questions. Sometimes, at its first sound, 
he would cross to the window and remain there 
looking for Her. At others, he would simply go 
and lie on the loud pedal, and we never could tell 
whether it was from sentiment, or because he 
thought that in this way he heard less. At one 
special Nocturne of Chopin's he always whim- 
pered. He was, indeed, of rather Polish tempera- 
ment — very gay when he was gay, dark and 
brooding when he was not. 

On the whole, perhaps his life was uneventful 
for so far-travelling a dog, though it held its mo- 
ments of eccentricity, as when he leaped through 
the window of a four-wheeler into Kensington, or 
sat on a Dartmoor adder. But that was fortu- 
nately of a Sunday afternoon — when adder and all 
were torpid, so nothing happened, till a friend, 
who was following, lifted him off the creature with 
his large boot. 

If only one could have known more of his private 
life — more of his relations with his own kind! 
I fancy he was always rather a dark dog to them, 
having so many thoughts about us that he could 
not share with any one, and being naturally fas- 
tidious, except with ladies, for whom he had a 
chivalrous and catholic taste, so that they often 
turned and snapped at him. He had, however, 

158 



MEMORIES 

but one lasting love affair, for a liver-coloured 
lass of our village, not quite of his own caste, but 
a wholesome if somewhat elderly girl, with loving 
and sphinx-like eyes. Their children, alas, were 
not for this world, and soon departed. 

Nor was he a fighting dog; but once attacked, 
he lacked a sense of values, being unable to dis- 
tinguish between dogs that he could beat and dogs 
with whom he had "no earthly." It was, in fact, 
as well to interfere at once, especially in the matter 
of retrievers, for he never forgot having in his 
youth been attacked by a retriever from behind. 
No, he never forgot, and never forgave, an enemy. 
Only a month before that day of which I cannot 
speak, being very old and ill, he engaged an Irish 
terrier on whose impudence he had long had his 
eye, and routed him. And how a battle cheered 
his spirit! He was certainly no Christian; but, 
allowing for essential dog, he was very much a 
gentleman. And I do think that most of us who 
live on this earth these days would rather leave it 
with that label on us than the other. For to be a 
Christian, as Tolstoy understood the word — and 
no one else in our time has had logic and love of 
truth enough to give it coherent meaning — is 
(to be quite sincere) not suited to men of Western 
blood. Whereas — to be a gentleman ! It is a far 

159 



CONCERNING LIFE 

cry, but perhaps it can be done. In him, at all 
events, there was no pettiness, no meanness, and 
no cruelty, and though he fell below his ideal at 
times, this never altered the true look of his eyes, 
nor the simple loyalty in his soul. 

But what a crowd of memories come back, 
bringing with them the perfume of fallen days! 
What delights and glamour, what long hours of 
effort, discouragements, and secret fears did he 
not watch over — our black familiar; and with the 
sight and scent and touch of him, deepen or as- 
suage! How many thousand walks did we not go 
together, so that we still turn to see if he is follow- 
ing at his padding gait, attentive to the invisible 
trails. Not the least hard thing to bear when they 
go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry 
away with them so many years of our own lives. 
Yet, if they find warmth therein, who would 
grudge them those years that they have so 
guarded? Nothing else of us can they take to 
lie upon with outstretched paws and chin pressed 
to the gromid; and, whatever they take, be sure 
they have deserved. 

Do they know, as we do, that their time must 
come? Yes, they know, at rare moments. No 
other way can I interpret those pauses of his latter 
life, when, propped on his forefeet, he would sit for 

160 



MEMORIES 

long minutes quite motionless — his head drooped, 
utterly withdrawn; then turn those eyes of his 
and look at me. That look said more plainly 
than all words could: "Yes, I know that I must 
go!" If we have spirits that persist — they have. 
If we know after our departure, who we were — 
they do. No one, I think, who really longs for 
truth, can ever glibly say which it will be for dog 
and man — persistence or extinction of our con- 
sciousness. There is but one thing certain — the 
childishness of fretting over that eternal question. 
Whichever it be, it must be right, the only possible 
thing. He felt that too, I know; but then, like 
his master, he was what is called a pessimist. 

My companion tells me that, since he left us, 
he has once come back. It was Old Year's Night, 
and she was sad, when he came to her in visible 
shape of his black body, passing round the dining- 
table from the window-end, to his proper place be- 
neath the table, at her feet. She saw him quite 
clearly; she heard the padding tap-tap of his paws 
and very toe-nails; she felt his warmth brushing 
hard against the front of her skirt. She thought 
then that he would settle down upon her feet, but 
something disturbed him, and he stood pausing, 
pressed against her, then moved out toward where 
I generally sit, but was not sitting that night. 

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CONCERNING LIFE 

She saw him stand there, as if considering; then 
at some sound or laugh, she became self-conscious, 
and slowly, very slowly, he was no longer there. 
Had he some message, some counsel to give, some- 
thing he would say, that last night of the last year 
of all those he had watched over us? Will he 
come back again? 

No stone stands over where he lies. It is on 
our hearts that his life is engraved. 

1912. 



162 



FELICITY 

WHEN God is so good to the fields, of what 
use are words — those poor husks of senti- 
ment! There is no painting FeHcity on the wing! 
No way of bringing on to the canvas the fiying 
glory of things ! A single buttercup of the twenty 
million in one field is worth all these dry symbols 
— that can never body forth the very spirit of 
that froth of May breaking over the hedges, the 
choir of birds and bees, the lost-travelling down of 
the wind-flowers, the white-throated swallows in 
their Odysseys. Just here there are no skylarks, 
but what joy of song and leaf; of lanes lighted 
with bright trees, the few oaks still golden brown, 
and the ashes still spiritual ! Only the blackbirds 
and thrushes can sing-up this day, and cuckoos 
over the hill. The year has flown so fast that the 
apple-trees have dropped nearly all their bloom, 
and in "long meadow" the "daggers" are out 
early, beside the narrow bright streams. Orpheus 
sits there on a stone, when nobody is by, and pipes 
to the ponies; and Pan can often be seen danc- 
ing with his nymphs in the raised beech-grove 

163 



CONCERNING LIFE 

where it is always tmlight, if you lie still enough 
against the far bank. 

Who can believe in growing old; so long as we 
are wrapped in this cloak of colour and wings and 
song; so long as this unimaginable vision is here 
for us to gaze at — the soft-faced sheep about us, 
and the wool-bags drying out along the fence, and 
great numbers of tiny ducks, so trustful that the 
crows have taken several. 

Blue is the colour of youth, and all the blue 
flowers have a "fey" look. Everything seems 
young — too young to work. There is but one 
thing busy, a starling, fetching grubs for its little 
family, above my head — it must take that flight 
at least two hundred times a day. The children 
should be very fat. 

When the sky is so happy, and the flowers so 
luminous, it does not seem possible that the bright 
angels of this day shall pass mto dark night, that 
slowly these wings shall close, and the cuckoo 
praise himself to sleep, mad midges dance-in the 
evening; the grass shiver with dew, wind die, and 
no bird sing. . . . 

Yet so it is. Day has gone — the song and glam- 
our and swoop of wings. Slowly has passed the 
daily miracle. It is night. But Felicity has not 
withdrawn; she has but changed her robe for 

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FELICITY 

silence, velvet, and the pearl fan of the moon. 
Everything is sleeping, save only a single star, and 
the pansies. Why they should be more wakeful 
than the other flowers, I do not know. The ex- 
pressions of their faces, if one bends down into the 
dusk, are sweeter and more cunning than ever. 
They have some compact, no doubt, in hand. 

What a number of voices have given up the 
ghost to this night of but one voice — ^the murmur 
of the stream out there in darkness! 

With what religion all has been done ! Not one 
buttercup open ; the yew-trees already with shad- 
ows flung down! No moths are abroad yet; it 
is too early in the year for nightjars; and the owls 
are quiet. But who shall say that in this silence, 
in this hovering wan light, in this air bereft of 
wings, and of all scent save freshness, there is less 
of the ineffable, less of that before which words are 
dumb? 

It is strange how this tranqufllity of night, that 
seems so final, is inhabited, if one keeps still 
enough. A lamb is bleating out there on the dim 
moor; a bird somewhere, a little one, about three 
fields away, makes the sweetest kind of chirrup- 
ing; some cows are still cropping. There is a 
scent, too, underneath the freshness — sweet-brier, 
I think, and our Dutch honeysuckle; nothing else 

165 



CONCERNING LIFE 

could so delicately twine itself with air. And even 
in this darkness the roses have colour, more beauti- 
ful perhaps than ever. If colour be, as they say, 
but the effect of light on various fibre, one may 
think of it as a tune, the song of thanksgiving that 
each form puts forth, to sun and moon and stars 
and fire. These moon-coloured roses are singing 
a most quiet song. I see all of a sudden that 
there are many more stars beside that one so red 
and watchful. The flown kite is there with its 
seven pale worlds; it has adventured very high 
and far to-night — with a company of others re- 
moter still. 

This serenity of night! What could seem less 
likely ever more to move, and change again to 
day? Surely now the world has found its long 
sleep ; and the pearly glimmer from the moon will 
last, and the precious silence never again yield 
to clamour; the grape-bloom of this mystery never 
more pale out into gold. . . . 

And yet it is not so. The nightly miracle has 
passed. It is dawn. Faint light has come. I 
am waiting for the first sound. The sky as yet 
is like nothing but grey paper, with the shadows 
of wild geese passing. The trees are phantoms. 
And then it comes — that first call of a bird, 
startled at discovering day! Just one call — and 

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FELICITY 

now, here, there, on all the trees, the sudden an- 
swers swelling, of that most sweet and careless 
choir. Was irresponsibihty ever so divine as 
this, of birds waking? Then — saffron into the 
sky, and once more silence! What is it birds do 
after the first Chorale? Think of their sins and 
business? Or just sleep again? The trees are 
fast dropping unreality, and the cuckoos begin 
calling. Colour is burning up in the flowers al- 
ready; the dew smells of them. 

The miracle is ended, for the starling has begun 
its job; and the sun is fretting those dark, busy 
wings with gold. Full day has come again. But 
the face of it is a Httle strange, it is not like yester- 
day. Queer — to think, no day is like to a day 
that's past and no night like a night that's coming ! 
Why, then, fear death, which is but night? Why 
care, if next day have different face and spirit? 

The sun has Hghted buttercup-field now, the 
wind touches the lime-tree. Something passes 
over me away up there. 

It is Felicity on her wings! 

1912. 



167 



CONCERNING LETTERS 



A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY 

ONCE upon a time the Prince of Felicitas had 
occasion to set forth on a journey. It was 
a late autumn evening with few pale stars and a 
moon no larger than the paring of a finger-nail. 
And as he rode through the purlieus of his city, 
the white mane of his amber-coloured steed was all 
that he could clearly see in the dusk of the high 
streets. His way led through a quarter but little 
known to him, and he was surprised to find that 
his horse, instead of ambling forward with his 
customary gentle vigour, stepped carefully from 
side to side, stopping now and then to curve hi& 
neck and prick his ears — as though at some thing 
of fear unseen in the darkness; while on either 
hand creatures could be heard rustling and scut- 
tling, and little cold draughts as of wings fanned 
the rider's cheeks. 

The Prince at last turned in his saddle, but so 
great was the darkness that he could not even see 
his escort. 

"What is the name of this street?" he said. 

"Sire, it is called the Vita Publica. " 
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CONCERNING LETTERS 

"It is very dark." Even as he spoke his horse 
staggered, but, recovering its foothold with an 
effort, stood trembling violently. Nor could all 
the incitements of its master induce the beast 
again to move forward. 

"Is there no one with a Ian thorn in this street? " 
asked the Prince. 

His attendants began forthwith to call out loudly 
for any one who had a lanthorn. Now, it chanced 
that an old man sleeping in a hovel on a pallet of 
straw was awakened by these cries. When he 
heard that it was the Prince of FeHcitas himself, 
he came hastily, carrying his lanthorn, and stood 
trembUng beside the Prince's horse. It was so 
dark that the Prince could not see him. 

"Light your lanthorn, old man," he said. 

The old man laboriously Ut his lanthorn. Its 
pale rays fled out on either hand; beautiful but 
grim was the vision they disclosed. Tall houses, 
fair court-yards, and a palm-grown garden; in 
front of the Prince's horse a deep cesspool, on 
whose jagged edges the good beast's hoofs were 
planted; and, as far as the glimmer of the lanthorn 
stretched, both ways down the rutted street, pav- 
ing stones displaced, and smooth tesselated mar- 
ble ; pools of mud, the hanging fruit of an orange- 
tree, and dark, scurrying shapes of monstrous rats 

172 



A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY 

bolting across from house to house. The old man 
held the lanthorn higher; and instantly bats flying 
against it would have beaten out the light but for 
the thin protection of its horn sides. 

The Prince sat still upon his horse, looking first 
at the rutted space that he had traversed and then 
at the rutted space before him. 

"Without a light," he said, "this thoroughfare 
is dangerous. What is your name, old man? " 

"My name is Cethru," replied the aged churl. 

"Cethru!" said the Prince. "Let it be your 
duty henceforth to walk with your lanthorn up 
and down this street all night and every night," 
— and he looked at Cethru: "Do you imderstand, 
old man, what it is you have to do?" 

The old man answered in a voice that trembled 
like a rusty flute: 

"Aye, aye! — to walk up and down and hold 
my lanthorn so that folk can see where they be 
goin'." 

The Prince gathered up his reins; but the old 
man, lurching forward, touched his stirrup. 

"How long be I to go on wi' thiccy job?" 

"Until you die!" 

Cethru held up his lanthorn, and they could see 
his long, thin face, like a sandwich of dried leather, 
jerk and quiver, and his thin grey hairs flutter in 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

the draught of the bats' wings circhng round the 
Hght. 

"'Twill be main hard!" he groaned; "an' my 
lanthorn's nowt but a poor thing. " 

With a high look, the Prince of Felicitas bent 
and touched the old man's forehead. 

"Until you die, old man," he repeated; and 
bidding his followers to light torches from Cethru's 
lanthorn, he rode on down the twisting street. 
The clatter of the horses' hoofs died out in the 
night, and the scuttling and the rustling of the 
rats and the whispers of the bats' wings were 
heard again. 

Cethru, left alone in the dark thoroughfare, 
sighed heavily; then, spitting on his hands, he 
tightened the old girdle round his loins, and sling- 
ing the lanthorn on his staff, held it up to the level 
of his waist, and began to make his way along the 
street. His progress was but slow, for he had 
many times to stop and rekindle the flame within 
his lanthorn, which the bats' wings, his own stum- 
bles, and the jostHngs of footpads or of revellers 
returning home, were for ever extinguishing. In 
traversing that long street he spent half the night, 
and half the night in traversing it back again. 
The saffron swan of dawn, slow swimming up the 
sky-river between the high roof-banks, bent her 

174 



A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY 

neck down through the dark air-water to look at 
him staggering below her, with his still smoking 
wick. No sooner did Cethru see that sunlit bird, 
than with a great sigh of joy he sat him down, and 
at once fell asleep. 

Now when the dwellers in the houses of the Vita 
Publica first gained knowledge that this old man 
passed eveiy night with his lanthorn up and down 
their street, and when they marked those pallid 
gleams gliding over the motley prospect of cess- 
pools and garden gates, over the sightless hovels 
and the rich-carved frontages of their palaces; or 
saw them stay their journey and remain suspended 
like a handful of daffodils held up against the black 
stuffs of secrecy — they said: 

"It is good that the old man should pass like 
this — ^we shall see better where we're going; and 
if the Watch have any job on hand, or want to 
put the pavements in order, his lanthorn will 
serve their purpose well enough." And they 
would call out of their doors and wuidows to him 
passing : 

"Hola! old man Cethru! All's well with our 
house, and with the street before it?" 

But, for answer, the old man only held his lan- 
thorn up, so that in the ring of its pale light they 
saw some sight or other in the street. And his 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

silence troubled them, one by one, for each had 
expected that he would reply: 

"Aye, aye! All's well with your house, Sirs, 
and with the street before it!" 

Thus they grew irritated with this old man who 
did not seem able to do anything but just hold his 
lanthorn up. And gradually they began to dis- 
like his passing by their doors with his pale light, 
by which they could not fail to see, not only the 
rich-carved frontages and scrolled gates of court- 
yards and fair gardens, but things that were not 
pleasing to the eye. And they murmured amongst 
themselves: "What is the good of this old man 
and his silly lanthorn? We can see all we want 
to see without him; in fact, we got on very well 
before he came." 

So, as he passed, rich folk who were supping 
would pelt him with orange-peel and empty the 
dregs of their wine over his head; and poor folk, 
sleeping in their hutches, turned over, as the rays 
of the lanthorn fell on them, and cursed him for 
that disturbance. Nor did revellers or footpads 
treat the old man civilly, but tied him to the wall, 
where he was constrained to stay till a kind passer- 
by released him. And ever the bats darkened his 
lanthorn with their wings and tried to beat the 
flame out. And the old man thought : "This be a 

176 



A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY 

terrible hard job; I don't seem to please nobody. " 
But because the Prince of Felicitas had so com- 
manded him, he continued nightly to pass with 
his lanthorn up and down the street; and eveiy 
morning as the saffron swan came swimming over- 
head, to fall asleep. But his sleep did not last 
long, for he was compelled to pass many hours each 
day in gathering rushes and melting down tallow 
for his lanthorn; so that his lean face grew more 
than ever like a sandwich of dried leather. 

Now it came to pass that the Town Watch hav- 
ing had certain complaints made to them that per- 
sons had been bitten in the Vita Publica by rats, 
doubted of their duty to destroy these ferocious 
creatures; and they held investigation, summon- 
ing the persons bitten and inquiring of them how 
it was that in so dark a street they could tell that 
the animals which had bitten them were indeed 
rats. Howbeit for some time no one could be 
found who could say more than what he had been 
told, and since this was not evidence, the Town 
Watch had good hopes that they would not after 
all be forced to undertake this tedious enterprise. 
But presently there came before them one who 
said that he had himself seen the rat which had 
bitten him, by the light of an old man's lanthorn. 
When the Town Watch heard this they were vexed, 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

for they knew that if this were true they would 
now be forced to prosecute the arduous undertak- 
ing, and they said: 

"Bring in this old man!" 

Cethru was brought before them trembling. 

"What is this we hear, old man, about your 
lanthorn and the rat? And in the first place, what 
were you doing in the Vita Publica at that time 
of night?" 

Cethru answered: "I were just passin' with my 
lanthorn!" 

"Tell us — did you see the rat?" 

Cethru shook his head: "My lanthorn seed the 
rat, maybe!" he muttered. 

"Old owl!" said the Captain of the Watch: 
"Be careful what you say! If you saw the rat, 
why did you then not aid this unhappy citizen 
who was bitten by it — first, to avoid that rodent, 
and subsequently to slay it, thereby relieving the 
public of a pestilential danger?" 

Cethru looked at him, and for some seconds did 
not reply; then he said slowly: "I were just 
passin' with my lanthorn." 

"That you have already told us," said the Cap- 
tain of the Watch ; " it is no answer. " 

Cethru's leathern cheeks became wine-coloured, 
so desirous was he to speak, and so unable. And 

178 



A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY 

the Watch sneered and laughed, saying: "This 
is a fine witness. " • • 

But of a sudden Cethru spoke: 

"What would I be duin' — killin' rats; tidden 
my business to kill rats." 

The Captain of the Watch caressed his beard, 
and looking at the old man with contempt, said: 

"It seems to me, brothers, that this is an idle 
old vagabond, who does no good to any one. We 
should be well advised, I think, to prosecute him 
for vagrancy. But that is not at this moment the 
matter in hand. Owing to the accident — scarcely 
fortunate — of this old man's passing with his Ian- 
thorn, it would certainly appear that citizens have 
been bitten by rodents. It is then, I fear, our 
duty to institute proceedings against those poison- 
ous and violent animals. " 

And amidst the sighing of the Watch, it was so 
resolved. 

Cethru was glad to shufHe away, unnoticed, 
from the Court, and sitting down under a camel- 
date tree outside the City Wall, he thus reflected : 

"They were rough with me! I done nothin', 
so far's I can see!" 

And a long time he sat there with the bunches 
of the camel-dates above him, golden as the sun- 
light. Then, as the scent of the lyrio flowers, re- 

179 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

leased by evening, warned him of the night drop- 
ping hke a flight of dark birds on the plain, he rose 
stiffly, and made his way as usual toward the Vita 
Publica. 

He had traversed but little of that black thor- 
oughfare, holding his lanthorn at the level of his 
breast, when the sound of a splash and cries for 
help smote his long, thin ears. Remembering how 
the Captain of the Watch had admonished him, he 
stopped and peered about, but owing to his prox- 
imity to the light of his own lanthorn he saw noth- 
ing. Presently he heard another splash and the 
sound of blowings and of puffings, but still unable 
to see clearly whence they came, he was forced 
in bewilderment to resume his march. But he 
had no sooner entered the next bend of that ob- 
scure and winding avenue than the most lamen- 
table, lusty cries assailed him. Again he stood 
still, bHnded by his own Hght. Somewhere at 
hand a citizen was being beaten, for vague, quick- 
moving forms emerged into the radiance of his 
lanthorn out of the deep violet of the night air. 
The cries swelled, and died away, and swelled; 
and the mazed Cethru moved forward on his way. 
But very near the end of his first traversage, the 
sound of a long, deep sighing, as of a fat man in 
spiritual pain, once more arrested him. 

180 



A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY 

"Drat me!" he thought, "this time I will see 
what 'tis/' and he spun round and round, holding 
his lanthorn now high, now low, and to both sides. 
"The devil an' all's in it to-night," he murmured 
to himself; "there's some 'at here fetchin' of its 
breath awful loud. " But for his life he could see 
nothing, only that the higher he held his lanthorn 
the more painful grew the sound of the fat but 
spiritual sighing. And desperately, he at last 
resumed his progress. 

On the morrow, while he still slept stretched on 
his straw pallet, there came to him a member of 
the Watch. 

"Old man, you are wanted at the Court House; 
rouse up, and bring your lanthorn. " 

Stiffly Cethru rose. 

"What be they wantin' me fur now, mester?" 

"Ah!" repHed the Watchman, "they are about 
to see if they can't put an end to your goings-on. " 

Cethru shivered, and was silent. 

Now when they reached the Court House it 
was patent that a great affair was forward; for 
the Judges were in their robes, and a crowd of 
advocates, burgesses, and common folk thronged 
the carven, lofty hall of justice. 

When Cethru saw that all eyes were turned on 
him, he shivered still more violently, fixing his 

181 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

fascinated gaze on the three Judges in their emer- 
ald robes. 

"This then is the prisoner," said the oldest of 
the Judges ; " proceed with the indictment ! ' ' 

A little advocate in snuff-coloured clothes rose 
on little legs, and commenced to read: 

"Forasmuch as on the seventeenth night of 
August fifteen hundred years since the Messiah's 
death, one Celestine, a maiden of this city, fell 
into a cesspool in the Vita Publica, and while be- 
ing quietly drowned, was espied of the burgess 
Pardonix by the light of a lanthorn held by the 
old man Cethru; and, forasmuch as, plunging in, 
the said Pardonix rescued her, not without grave 
risk of life and the ruin of his clothes, and to-day 
lies ill of fever; and forasmuch as the old man 
Cethru was the cause of these misfortunes to the 
burgess Pardonix, by reason of his wandering 
lanthorn's showing the drowning maiden, the 
Watch do hereby indict, accuse, and otheiivise 
place charge upon this Cethru of 'Vagabondage 
without serious occupation. ' 

"And, forasmuch as on this same night the 
Watchman Filepo, made aware, by the light of 
this said Cethru 's lanthorn, of three sturdy foot- 
pads, went to arrest them, and was set on by the 
rogues and wellnigh slain, the Watch do hereby 

182 



A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY 

indict, accuse, and otherwise charge upon Cethru 
compHcity in this assault, by reasons, namely, 
first, that he discovered the footpads to the Watch- 
man and the Watchman to the footpads by the 
light of his lanthorn; and, second, that, having 
thus discovered them, he stood idly by and gave 
no assistance to the law. 

^'And, forasmuch as on this same night the 
wealthy burgess Pranzo, who, having prepared a 
banquet, was standing in his doorway awaiting 
the arrival of his guests, did see, by the light of 
the said Cethru's lanthorn, a beggar woman and 
her children grovelling in the gutter for garbage, 
whereby his appetite was lost completely; and, 
forasmuch as he, Pranzo, has lodged a complaint 
against the Constitution for permitting women and 
children to go starved, the Watch do hereby in- 
dict, accuse, and otherwise make charge on Cethru 
of rebelhon and of anarchy, in that wilfully he 
doth disturb good citizens by showing to them 
without provocation disagreeable sights, and doth 
moreover endanger the laws by causing persons 
to desire to change them. 

"These be the charges, reverend Judges, so 
please you!" 

And having thus spoken, the Httle advocate 
resumed his seat. 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

Then said the oldest of the Judges: 

"CethrU; you have heard; what answer do you 
make?" 

But no word; only the chattering of teeth, came 
from Cethru. 

"Have you no defence?" said the Judge: 
"these are grave accusations!" 

Then Cethru spoke. 

"So please your Highnesses," he said, "can I 
help what my lanthorn sees?" 

And having spoken these words, to all further 
questions he remained more silent than a head- 
less man. 

The Judges took counsel of each other, and the 
oldest of them thus addressed himself to Cethru: 

"If you have no defence, old man, and there is 
no one will say a word for you, we can but proceed 
to judgment." 

Then in the main aisle of the Court there rose 
a youthful advocate. 

"Most reverend Judges," he said in a mellif- 
luous voice, clearer than the fluting of a bell-bird, 
"it is useless to look for words from this old man, 
for it is manifest that he himself is nothing, and 
that his lanthorn is alone concerned in this affair. 
But, reverend Judges, bethink you well: Would 
you have a lanthorn ply a trade or be concerned 

184 



A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY 

with a profession, or do aught indeed but pervade 
the streets at night, shedding its Hght, which, if 
you will, is vagabondage? And, Sirs, upon the 
second count of this indictment : Would you have 
a lanthorn dive into cesspools to rescue maidens? 
Would you have a lanthorn to beat footpads? Or, 
indeed, to be any sort of partisan either of the Law 
or of them that break the Law? Sure, Sirs, I 
think not. And as to this third charge of foster- 
ing anarchy — let me but describe the trick of this 
lanthorn's flame. It is distilled, most reverend 
Judges, of oil and wick, together with that sweet 
secret heat of whose birth no words of mine can 
tell. And when. Sirs, this pale flame has sprung 
into the air swaying to every wind, it brings 
vision to the human eye. And, if it be charged on 
this old man Cethru that he and his lanthorn by 
reason of their showing not only the good but the 
evil bring no pleasure into the world, I ask. Sirs, 
what in the world is so dear as this power to see — 
whether it be the beautiful or the foul that is dis- 
closed? Need I, indeed, tell you of the way this 
flame spreads its feelers, and delicately darts and 
hovers in the darkness, conjuring things from 
nothing? This mechanical summoning, Sirs, of 
visions out of blackness is benign, by no means of 
malevolent intent; no more than if a man, pass- 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

ing two donkeys in the road, one lean and the 
other fat, could justly be arraigned for malignancy 
because they were not both fat. This, reverend 
Judges, is the essence of the matter concerning 
the rich burgess, Pranzo, who, on account of the 
sight he saw by Cethru's lanthorn, has lost the 
equilibrium of his stomach. For, Sirs, the lan- 
thorn did but show that which was there, both 
fair and foul, no more, no less; and though it is 
indeed true that Pranzo is upset, it was not 
because the lanthorn maliciously produced dis- 
torted images, but merely caused to be seen, in 
due proportions, things which Pranzo had not 
seen before. And surely, reverend Judges, being 
just men, you would not have this lanthorn turn 
its light away from what is ragged and ugly 
because there are also fair things on which its 
light may fall; how, indeed, being a lanthorn, 
could it, if it would? And I would have you 
note this. Sirs, that by this impartial discovery 
of the proportions of one thing to another, this 
lanthorn must indeed perpetually seem to cloud 
and sadden those things which are fair, because 
of the deep instincts of harmony and justice 
planted in the human breast. However unfair 
and cruel, then, this lanthorn may seem to those 
who, deficient in these instincts, desire all their 

186 



A NOVELIST'S ALLEGORY 

lives to see naught but what is pleasant, lest 
they, like Pranzo, should lose their appetites — 
it is not consonant with equity that this lanthorn 
should, even if it could, be prevented from thus 
mechanically buffeting the holiday cheek of life. 
I would think, Sirs, that you should rather blame 
the queazy state of Pranzo's stomach. The old 
man has said that he cannot help what his lan- 
thorn sees. This is a just saying. But if, rever- 
end Judges, you deem this equipoised, indifferent 
lanthorn to be indeed blameworthy for having 
shown in the same moment, side by side, the skull 
and the fair face, the burdock and the tiger-lil}'-, 
the butterfly and toad, then, most reverend 
Judges, punish it, but do not punish this old man, 
for he himself is but a flume of smoke, thistle 
down dispersed — nothing ! " 

So saying, the young advocate ceased. 

Again the three Judges took counsel of each 
other, and after much talk had passed between 
them, the oldest spoke : 

"What this young advocate has said seems 
to us to be the truth. We cannot punish a lan- 
thorn. Let the old man go!" 

And Cethru went out into the sunshine. . . . 

Now it came to pass that the Prince of Felic- 
itas, returning from his journey, rode once more 

187 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

on his amber- coloured , steed down the Vita 
Pubhca. 

The night was dark as a rook's wing, but far 
away down the street burned a Httle Hght, Uke a 
red star truant from heaven. The Prince riding 
by descried it for a lanthorn, with an old man 
sleeping beside it. 

"How is this, Friend?" said the Prince. "You 
are not walking as I bade 3^ou, carrying your 
lanthorn." 

But Cethru neither moved nor answered. 

"Lift him up!" said the Prince. 

They lifted up his head and held the lanthorn 
to his closed eyes. So lean was that brown face 
that the beams from the lanthorn would not rest 
on it, but slipped past on either side into the night. 
His eyes did not open. He was dead. 

And the Prince touched him, saying : " Farewell, 
old man! The lanthorn is still alight. Go, fetch 
me another one, and let him carry it!" . . . 

1909. 



188 



SOME PLATITUDES CONCERNING 
DRAMA 

A DRAMA must be shaped so as to have a 
spire of meaning. Every grouping of life 
and character has its inherent moral; and the 
business of the dramatist is so to pose the group 
as to bring that moral poignantly to the light of 
day. Such is the moral that exhales from plays 
like Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth. But such is not 
the moral to be found in the great bulk of con- 
temporary Drama. The moral of the average 
play is now, and probably has always been, the 
triumph at all costs of a supposed immediate ethi- 
cal good over a supposed immediate ethical evil. 

The vice of drawing these distorted morals has 
permeated the Drama to its spine ; discoloured its 
art, humanity, and significance; infected its 
creators, actors, audience, critics; too often turned 
it from a picture into a caricature. A Drama 
which lives under the shadow of the distorted 
moral forgets how to be free, fair, and fine — for- 
gets so completely that it often prides itself on 
having forgotten. 

Now, in writing plays, there are, in this matter 
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CONCERNING LETTERS 

of the moral, three courses open to the serious 
dramatist. The first is: To definitely set before 
the public that which it wishes to have set before 
it, the views and codes of life by which the public 
lives and in which it believes. This way is the 
most common, successful, and popular. It makes 
the dramatist's position sure, and not too obvi- 
ously authoritative. 

The second course is: To definitely set before 
the public those views and codes of life by which 
the dramatist himself lives, those theories in which 
he himself believes, the more effectively if they are 
the opposite of what the public wishes to have 
placed before it, presenting them so that the audi- 
ence may swallow them like powder in a spoonful 
of jam. 

There is a third course : To set before the public 
no cut-and-dried codes, but the phenomena of 
life and character, selected and combined, hut 
not distorted, by the dramatist's outlook, set down 
without fear, favour, or prejudice, leaving the pub- 
lic to draw such poor moral as nature may afford. 
This third method requires a certain detachment; 
it requires a sympathy with, a love of, and a 
curiosity as to, things for their own sake; it re- 
quires a far view, together with patient industry, 
for no immediately practical result. 

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PLATITUDES CONCERNING DRAMA 

It was once said of Shakespeare that he had 
never done any good to any one, and never would. 
This, unfortunately, could not, in the sense in 
which the word "good" was then meant, be said 
of most modern dramatists. In truth, the good 
that Shakespeare did to humanity was of a remote, 
and, shall we say, eternal nature; something of 
the good that men get from having the sky and 
the sea to look at. And this partly because he 
was, in his greater plays at all events, free from 
the habit of drawing a distorted moral. Now, the 
playwright who supplies to the public the facts 
of life distorted by the moral which it expects, does 
so that he may do the public what he considers an 
immediate good, by fortifying its prejudices; and 
the dramatist who supplies to the public facts dis- 
torted by his own advanced morality, does so be- 
cause he considers that he will at once benefit the 
public by substituting for its worn-out ethics, his 
own. In both cases the advantage the dramatist 
hopes to confer on the public is immediate and 
practical. 

But matters change, and morals change; men 
remain — and to set men, and the facts about them, 
down faithfully, so that they draw for us the moral 
of their natural actions, may also possibly be of 
benefit to the community. It is, at all events, 

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harder than to set men and facts down, as they 
ought, or ought not to be. This, however, is not 
to say that a dramatist should, or indeed can, 
keep himself and his temperamental philosophy 
out of his work. As a man lives and thinks, so 
will he write. But it is certain, that to the making 
of good drama, as to the practice of every other 
art, there must be brought an almost passionate 
love of discipline, a white-heat of self-respect, a 
desire to make the truest, fairest, best thing in 
one's power; and that to these must be added an 
eye that does not flinch. Such qualities alone 
will bring to a drama the selfless character which 
soaks it with inevitability. 

The word "pessimist" is frequently applied 
to the few dramatists who have been content to 
work in this way. It has been applied, among 
others, to Euripides, to Shakespeare, to Ibsen; it 
will be applied to many in the future. Nothing, 
however, is more dubious than the way in which 
these two words "pessimist" and "optimist" are 
used; for the optimist appears to be he who can- 
not bear the world as it is, and is forced by his 
nature to picture it as it ought to be, and the 
pessimist one who cannot only bear the world as 
it is, but loves it well enough to draw it faithfully. 
The true lover of the human race is surely he who 

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can put up with it in all its forms, in vice as well 
as in virtue, in defeat no less than in victory; the 
true seer he who sees not only joy but sorrow, the 
true painter of human life one who blinks nothing. 
It may be that he is also, incidentally, its true 
benefactor. 

In the whole range of the social fabric there are 
only two impartial persons, the scientist and the 
artist, and under the latter heading such dram- 
atists as desire to write not only for to-day, but 
for to-morrow, must strive to come. 

But dramatists being as they are made — past 
remedy — it is perhaps more profitable to examine 
the various points at which their qualities and 
defects are shown. 

The plot ! A good plot is that sure edifice which 
slowly rises out of the interplay of circumstance 
on temperament, and temperament on circum- 
stance, within the enclosing atmosphere of an idea. 
A human being is the best plot there is ; it may be 
impossible to see why he is a good plot, because the 
idea within which he was brought forth cannot 
be fully grasped; but it is plain that he is a good 
plot. He is organic. And so it must be with a 
good play. Reason alone produces no good plots; 
they come by original sin, sure conception, and 
instinctive after-power of selecting what benefits 

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the germ. A bad plot, on the other hand, is sim- 
ply a row of stakes, with a character impaled on 
each — characters who would have liked to live, 
but came to untimely grief; who started bravely, 
but fell on these stakes, placed beforehand in a 
row, and were transfixed one by one, while their 
ghosts stride on, squeaking and gibbering, through 
the play. Whether these stakes are made of facts 
or of ideas, according to the nature of the dramatist 
who planted them, their effect on the unfortunate 
characters is the same ; the creatures were begotten 
to be staked, and staked they are! The demand 
for a good plot, not unfrequently heard, commonly 
signifies: "Tickle my sensations by stuffing the 
play with arbitrary adventures, so that I need not 
be troubled to take the characters seriously. Set 
the persons of the play to action, regardless of 
time, sequence, atmosphere, and probability!" 

Now, true dramatic action is what characters 
do, at once contrary, as it were, to expectation, 
and yet because they have already done other 
things. No dramatist should let his audience 
know what is coming; but neither should he suffer 
his characters to act without making his audience 
feel that those actions are in harmony with temper- 
ament, and arise from previous known actions, to- 
gether with the temperaments and previous known 

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actions of the other characters in the play. The 
dramatist who hangs his characters to his plot, 
instead of hanging his plot to his characters, is 
guilty of cardinal sin. 

The dialogue ! Good dialogue again is character, 
marshalled so as continually to stimulate interest 
or excitement. The reason good dialogue is sel- 
dom found in plays is merely that it is hard to 
write, for it requires not only a knowledge of what 
interests or excites, but such a feeling for character 
as brings misery to the dramatist's heart when his 
creations speak as they should not speak — ashes 
to his mouth when they say things for the sake 
of saying them — disgust when they are "smart." 

The art of writing true dramatic dialogue is an 
austere arr, denying itself all hcense, grudging 
every sentence devoted to the mere machinery of 
the play, suppressing all jokes and epigrams 
severed from character, relying for fun and pathos 
on the fun and tears of life. From start to finish 
good dialogue is hand-made, like good lace ; clear, 
of fine texture, furthering with each thread the 
harmony and strength of a design to which all 
must be subordinated. 

But good dialogue is also spiritual action. In 
so far as the dramatist divorces his dialogue from 
spiritual action — that is to say, from progress of 

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events, or toward events which are significant of 
character — he is stultifying to Bpd/ia the thing 
done; he may make pleasing disquisitions, he is 
not making drama. And in so far as he twists 
character to suit his moral or his plot, he is neg- 
lecting a first principle, that truth to Nature which 
alone invests art with hand-made quality. 

The dramatist's license, in fact, ends with his 
design. In conception alone he is free. He may 
take what character or group of characters he 
chooses, see them with what eyes, knit them with 
what idea, within the limits of his temperament; 
but once taken, seen, and knitted, he is bound to 
treat them like a gentleman, with the tenderest 
consideration of their mainsprings. Take care 
of character; action and dialogue will take care 
of themselves! The true dramatist gives full 
rein to his temperament in the scope and nature of 
his subject; having once selected subject and char- 
acters, he is just, gentle, restrained, neither 
gratifying his lust for praise at the expense of his 
offspring, nor using them as puppets to flout his 
audience. Being himself the nature that brought 
them forth, he guides them in the course pre- 
destined at their conception. So only have they 
a chance of defying Time, which is always lying 
in wait to destroy the false, topical, or fashionable, 

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PLATITUDES CONCERNING DRAMA 

all — in a word — that is not based on the permanent 
elements of human nature. The perfect dramatist 
rounds up his characters and facts within the ring- 
fence of a dominant idea which fulfils the craving 
of his spirit; having got them there, he suffers 
them to live their own lives. 

Plot, action, character, dialogue! But there 
is yet another subject for a platitude. Flavour! 
An impalpable quality, less easily captured than 
the scent of a flower, the peculiar and most essen- 
tial attribute of any work of art! It is the thin, 
poignant spirit which hovers up out of a play, and 
is as much its differentiating essence as is caffeine 
of coffee. Flavour, in fine, is the spirit of the 
dramatist projected into his work in a state of 
volatility, so that no one can exactly lay hands 
on it, here, there, or anywhere. This distinctive 
essence of a play, marking its brand, is the one 
thing at which the dramatist cannot work, for it 
is outside his consciousness. A man may have 
many moods, he has but one spirit; and this 
spirit he communicates in some subtle, unconscious 
way to all his work. It waxes and wanes with the 
currents of his vitality, but no more alters than a 
chestnut changes into an oak. 

For, in truth, dramas are very like unto trees, 
springing from seedlings, shaping themselves in- 
evitably in accordance with the laws fast hidden 

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within themselves, drinking sustenance from the 
earth and air, and in conflict with the natural 
forces round them. So they slowly come to full 
growth, until warped, stunted, or risen to fair and 
gracious height, they stand open to all the winds. 
And the trees that spring from each dramatist are 
of different race; he is the spirit of his own sacred 
grove, into which no stray tree can by any chance 
enter. 

One more platitude. It is not unfashionable to 
pit one form of drama against another — holding 
up the naturalistic to the disadvantage of the 
epic; the epic to the belittlement of the fantastic; 
the fantastic to the detriment of the naturalistic. 
Little purpose is thus served. The essential mean- 
ing, truth, beauty, and irony of things may be 
revealed under all these forms. Vision over life 
and human nature can be as keen and just, the 
revelation as true, inspiring, delight-giving, and 
thought-provoking, whatever fashion be employed 
— it is simply a question of doing it well enough 
to uncover the kernel of the nut. Whether the 
violet come from Russia, from Parma, or from 
England, matters little. Close by the Greek 
temples at Paestum there are violets that seem 
redder, and sweeter, than any ever seen — as 
though they have sprung up out of the footprints 
of some old pagan goddess; but under the April 

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sun, in a Devonshire lane, the Httle blue scentless 
violets capture every bit as much of the spring. 
And so it is with drama — no matter what its form 
— it need only be the "real thing, " need only have 
caught some of the precious fluids, revelation, or 
delight, and imprisoned them within a chahce to 
which we may put our lips and continually drink. 

And yet, starting from this last platitude, one 
may perhaps be suffered to speculate as to the 
particular forms that our renascent drama is 
likely to assume. For our drama is renascent, 
and nothing will stop its growth. It is not re- 
nascent because this or that man is writing, but 
because of a new spirit. A spirit that is no doubt 
in part the gradual outcome of the impact on our 
home-grown art, of Russian, French, and Scandi- 
navian influences, but which in the main rises from 
an awakened humanity in the conscience of our time. 

What, then, are to be the main channels down 
which the renascent English drama will float in 
the coming years? It is more than possible that 
these main channels will come to be two in num- 
ber and situate far apart. 

The one will be the broad and clear-cut channel 
of naturalism, down which will course a drama 
poignantly shaped, and inspired with high inten- 
tion, but faithful to the seething and multiple life 

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around us, drama such as some are inclined to 
term photographic, deceived by a seeming sim- 
pHcity into forgetfulness of the old proverb, "Ars 
est celare artem, " and oblivious of the fact that, 
to be vital, to grip, such drama is in eveiy respect 
as dependent on imagination, construction, selec- 
tion, and elimination — the main laws of artistry 
— as ever was the romantic or rhapsodic play. 
The question of naturalistic technique will bear, 
indeed, much more study than has yet been given 
to it. The aim of the dramatist employing it is 
obviously to create such an illusion of actual life 
passing on the stage as to compel the spectator 
to pass through an experience of his own, to think, 
and talk, and move with the people he sees think- 
ing, talking, and moving in front of him. A false 
phrase, a single word out of tune or time, will de- 
stroy that illusion and spoil the surface as surely 
as a stone heaved into a still pool shatters the image 
seen there. But this is only the beginning of the 
reason why the naturalistic is the most exacting 
and difficult of all techniques. It is easy enough 
to reproduce the exact conversation and move- 
ments of persons in a room ; it is desperately hard 
to produce the perfectly natural conversation and 
movements of those persons, when each natural 
phrase spoken and each natural movement made 

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has not only to contribute toward the growth and 
perfection of a drama's soul, but also to be a reve- 
lation, phrase by phrase, movement by move- 
ment, of essential traits of character. To put it 
another way, naturalistic art, when alive, indeed 
to be ahve at all, is simply the art of manipu- 
lating a procession of most delicate symbols. Its 
service is the swaying and focussing of men's 
feelings and thoughts in the various departments 
of human life. It will be like a steady lamp, held 
up from time to time, in whose Hght things will be 
seen for a space clearly and in due proportion, 
freed from the mists of prejudice and partisanship. 
And the other of these two main channels will, 
I think, be a twisting and dehcious stream, which 
will bear on its breast new barques of poetry, 
shaped, it may be, hke prose, but a prose incarnat- 
ing through its fantasy and symbolism all the 
deeper aspirations, yearning, doubts, and myste- 
rious stirrings of the human spirit; a poetic 
prose-drama, emotionalising us by its diversity 
and purity of form and invention, and whose 
province will be to disclose the elemental soul of 
man and the forces of Nature, not perhaps as the 
old tragedies disclosed them, not necessarily in 
the epic mood, but always with beauty and in the 
spirit of discovery. 

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Such will; I think, be the two vital forms of our 
drama in the coming generation. And between 
these two forms there must be no crude unions; 
they are too far apart, the cross is too violent. 
For, where there is a seeming blend of lyricism and 
naturalism, it will on examination be found, I 
think, to exist only in plays whose subjects or 
settings — as in Synge's "Playboy of the Western 
World," or in Mr. Masefield's "Nan" — are so re- 
moved from our ken that we cannot really tell, 
and therefore do not care, whether an absolute il- 
lusion is maintained. The poetry which may and 
should exist in naturalistic drama, can only be that 
of perfect rightness of proportion, rhythm, shape — 
the poetry, in fact, that lies in all vital things. It is 
the ill-mating of forms that has killed a thousand 
plays. We want no more bastard drama; no 
more attempts to dress out the simple dignity of 
everyday life in the peacock's feathers of false 
lyricism; no more straw-stuffed heroes or heroines; 
no more rabbits and goldfish from the conjurer's 
pockets, nor any limelight. Let us have starlight, 
moonlight, sunlight, and the light of our own self- 
respects. 

1909. 



202 



MEDITATION ON FINALITY 

IN the Grand Canyon of Arizona; that most ex- 
hilarating of all natural phenomena, Nature 
has for once so focussed her effects, that the result 
is a framed and final work of Art. For there, be- 
tween two high hnes of plateau, level as the sea, 
are sunk the wrought thrones of the innumerable 
gods, couchant, and for ever revering, in their 
million moods of light and colour, the Master 
Mystery. 

Having seen this culmination, I realize why 
many people either recoil before it, and take the 
first train home, or speak of it as a "remarkable 
formation. " For, though mankind at large craves 
finality, it does not crave the sort that bends the 
knee to Mystery. In Nature, in Rehgion, in Art, 
in Life, the common cry is: "Tell me precisely 
where I am, what doing, and where going! Let me 
be free of this fearful untidiness of not knowing 
all about it!" The favoured religions are always 
those whose message is most finite. The fashion- 
able professions — they that end us in assured posi- 
tions. The most popular works of fiction, such 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

as leave nothing to our imagination. And to this 
craving after prose, who would not be lenient, that 
has at all known life, with its usual predominance 
of our lower and less courageous selves, our con- 
stant hankering after the cosey closed door and 
line of least resistance? We are continually beg- 
ging to be allowed to know for certain; though, if 
our prayer were granted, and Mystery no longer 
hovered, made blue the hills, and turned day 
into night, we should, as surely, wail at once 
to be delivered of that ghastliness of knowing 
things for certain! 

Now, in Art, I would never quarrel with a cer- 
tain living writer who demands of it the kind of 
finality implied in what he calls a "moral dis- 
covery" — using, no doubt, the words in their 
widest sense. I would maintain, however, that 
such finahty is not confined to positively discover- 
ing the true conclusion of premises laid down; but 
that it may also distil gradually, negatively from 
the whole work, in a moral discovery, as it were, 
of Author. In other words, that, permeation by 
an essential point of view, by emanation of author, 
may so unify and vitalize a work, as to give it all 
the finality that need be required of Art. For the 
finality that is requisite to Art, be it positive or 
negative, is not the finality of dogma, nor the 

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MEDITATION ON FINALITY 

finality of fact, it is ever the finality of feeling — of 
a spiritual light, subtly gleaned by the spectator 
out of that queer luminous haze which one man's 
nature must ever be to others. And herein, 
incidentally, it is that Art acquires also that 
quality of mystery, more needful to it even than 
finality, for the mystery that wraps a work of 
Art is the mystery of its maker, and the mystery 
of its maker is the difference between that maker's 
soul and every other soul. 

But let me take an illustration of what I mean 
by these two kinds of finality that Art may have, 
and show that in essence they are but two halves 
of the same thing. The term "a work of Art" 
will not be denied, I think, to that early novel of 
M. Anatole France, "Le Lys Rouge." Now, 
that novel has positive finality, since the spiritual 
conclusion from its premises strikes one as true. 
But neither will the term "a work of Art" be 
denied to the same writer's four "Bergeret" vol- 
umes, whose negative finality consists only in the 
temperamental atmosphere wherein they are 
soaked. Now, if the theme of "Le Lys Rouge" 
had been treated by Tolstoy, Meredith, or Tur- 
genev, we should have had spiritual conclusions 
from the same factual premises so different from 
M. France's as prunes from prisms, and yet, being 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

the work of equally great artists, they would, 
doubtless, have struck us as equally true. Is not, 
then, the positive finality of "Le Lys Rouge," 
though expressed in terms of a different craftsman- 
ship, the same, in essence, as the negative finality 
of the " Bergeret " volumes ? Are not both, in fact, 
merely flower of author true to himself ? So long 
as the scent, colour, form of that flower is strong 
and fine enough to affect the senses of our spirit, 
then all the rest, surely, is academic — I would 
say, immaterial. 

But here, in regard to Art, is where mankind at 
large comes on the field. " 'Flower of author,' " it 
says, "'Senses of the spirit!' Phew! Give me 
something I can understand ! Let me know where 
I am getting to!" In a word, it wants a finality 
different from that which Art can give. It will 
ask the artist, with irritation, what his solution, or 
his lesson, or his meaning, really is, having omitted 
to notice that the poor creature has been giving 
all the meaning that he can, in every sentence. It 
will demand to know why it was not told definitely 
what became of Charles or Mary in whom it had 
grown so interested; and will be almost frightened 
to learn that the artist knows no more than itself. 
And if by any chance it be required to dip its mind 
into a philosophy that does not promise it a defined 

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MEDITATION ON FINALITY 

position both in this world and the next, it will as- 
suredly recoil; and with a certain contempt say: 
"No; sir! This means nothing to me; and if it 
means anything to you — which I very much doubt 
— I am sorry for you!" 

It must have facts, and again facts, not only in 
the present and the past, but in the future. And 
it demands facts of that, which alone cannot glibly 
give it facts. It goes on asking facts of Art, or, 
rather, such facts as Art cannot give — for, after 
all, even "flower of author" is fact in a sort of 
way. 

Consider, for instance, Synge's masterpiece, 
"The Playboy of the Western World!" There is 
flower of author! What is it for mankind at 
large? An attack on the Irish character! A 
pretty piece of writing! An amusing farce! 
Enigmatic cynicism leading nowhere ! A puzzling 
fellow wrote it! Mankind at large has little 
patience with puzzling fellows. 

Few, in fact, want flower of author. Moreover, 
it is a quality that may well be looked for where it 
does not exist. To say that the finality which 
Art requires is merely an enwrapping mood, or 
flower of author, is not by any means to say that 
any robust fellow, slamming his notions down in 
ink, can give us these. Indeed, no! So long as 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

we see the author's proper person in his work, we 
do not see the flower of him. Let him retreat him- 
self, if he pretend to be an artist. There is no less 
of subtle skill, no less impersonaHty, in the "Ber- 
geret" volumes than in "Le Lys Rouge." No 
less labour and mental torturing went to their 
making, page by page, in order that they might 
exhale their perfume of mysterious finality, their 
withdrawn but implicit judgment. Flower of 
author is not quite so common as the buttercup, 
the Calif omian poppy, or the gay Texan gaillardia, 
and for that very reason the finality it gives off 
will never be robust enough for a mankind at large 
that would have things cut and dried, and labelled 
in thick letters. For, consider — to take one phase 
alone of this demand for factual finality — how 
continual and insistent is the cry for characters 
that can be worshipped; how intense and per- 
sistent the desire to be told that Charles was a real 
hero ; and how bitter the regret that Mary was no 
better than she should be! Mankind at large 
wants heroes that are heroes, and heroines that 
are heroines — and nothing so inappropriate to 
them as unhappy endings. 

Travelling away, I remember, from that Grand 
Canyon of Arizona were a young man and a young 
woman, evidently in love. He was sitting very 

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MEDITATION ON FINALITY 

close to her, and reading aloud for her pleasure, 
from a paper-covered novel, heroically oblivious 
of us all : 

"'Sir Robert,' she murmured, lifting her beau- 
teous eyes, ' I may not tempt you, for you are too 
dear to me!' Sir Robert held her lovely face be- 
tween his two strong hands. ' Farewell ! ' he said, 
and went out into the night. But something 
told them both that, when he had fulfilled his duty, 
Sir Robert would return. . . ." He had not re- 
turned before we reached the Junction, but there 
was finality about that baronet, and we well knew 
that he ultimately would. And, long after the 
sound of that young man's faithful reading had 
died out of our ears, we meditated on Sir Robert, 
and compared him with the famous characters of 
fiction, slowly perceivuig that they were none of 
them so final in their heroism as he. No, none of 
them reached that apex. For Hamlet was a most 
unfinished fellow, and Lear extremely violent. 
Pickwick addicted to punch, and Sam Weller to 
lying; Bazarof actually a Nihilist, and Irina — ! 
Levin and Anna, Pierre and Natasha, all of them 
stormy and unsatisfactory at times. "Un Coeur 
Simple" nothing but a servant, and an old maid 
at that; "Saint Julien I'Hospitalier" a sheer 
fanatic. Colonel Newcome too irritable and too 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

simple altogether. Don Quixote certified insane. 
Hilda Wangel; Nora, Hedda — Sir Robert would 
never even have spoken to such baggages! Mon- 
sieur Bergeret — an amiable weak thing! D'Arta- 
gnan — a true swashbuckler! Tom Jones, Faust, 
Don Juan — we might not even think of them. 
And those poor Greeks: Prometheus — shocking 
rebel. (Edipus — for a long time banished by the 
Censor. Phsedra and Elektra, not even so virtu- 
ous as Mary, who failed of being what she should 
be! And coming to more familiar persons — 
Joseph and Moses, David and Elijah, all of them 
lacked his finality of true heroism — none could 
quite pass muster beside Sir Robert. . . . Long 
we meditated, and, reflecting that an author must 
ever be superior to the creatures of his brain, were 
refreshed to think that there were so many living 
authors capable of giving birth to Sir Robert; for 
indeed. Sir Robert and finality like his — ^no doubt- 
ful heroes, no flower of author, and no mystery 
— is what mankind at large has always wanted 
from Letters, and will always want. 

As truly as that oil and water do not mix, there 
are two kinds of men. The main cleavage in the 
whole tale of life is this subtle, all-pervading divi- 
sion of mankind into the man of facts and the 
man of feeling. And not by what they are or do 

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MEDITATION ON FINALITY 

can they be told one from the other, but just 
by their attitude toward finaHty. Fortunately 
most of us are neither quite the one nor quite 
the other. But between the pure-blooded of 
each kind there is real antipathy, far deeper 
than the antipathies of race, politics, or religion — 
an antipathy that not circumstance, love, good- 
will, or necessity will ever quite get rid of. Sooner 
shall the panther agree with the bull than that 
other one with the man of facts. There is no 
bridging the gorge that divides these worlds. 

Nor is it so easy to tell, of each, to which world 
he belongs, as it was to place the lady, who held 
out her finger over that gorge called Grand Canyon, 
and said: 

"It doesn't look thirteen miles; but they meas- 
ured it j ust there ! Excuse my pointing ! ' ' 

1912. 



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WANTED— SCHOOLING 

"TT^T nous jongleurs inutiles, frivoles joueurs de 
/ J luthV^ . . . Useless jugglerSj frivolous play- 
ers on the lute! Must we so describe ourselves, 
we, the producers, season by season, of so many 
hundreds of "remarkable" works of fiction? — for 
though, when we take up the remarkable works of 
our fellows, we "really cannot read them!" the 
Press and the advertisements of our publishers tell 
us that they are "remarkable." 

A story goes that once in the twihght under- 
growth of a forest of nut-bearing trees a number of 
little purblind creatures wandered, singing for 
nuts. On some of these purblind creatures the 
nuts fell heavy and full, extremely indigestible, 
and were quickly swallowed; on others they fell 
light, and contained nothing, because the kernel 
had already been eaten up above, and these light 
and kernel-less nuts were accompanied by sibila- 
tions or laughter. On others again no nuts at all, 
empty or full, came down. But nuts or no nuts, 
full nuts or empty nuts, the purblind creatures be- 
low went on wandering and singing. A traveller 

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WANTED— SCHOOLING 

one day stopped one of these creatures whose 
voice was pecuHarly disagreeable, and asked: 
"Why do you sing like this? Is it for pleasure 
that you do it, or for pain? What do you get out 
of it? Is it for the sake of those up there? Is it 
for your own sake — for the sake of your family — 
for whose sake? Do you thuik your songs worth 
listening to? Answer!" 

The creature scratched itself, and sang the louder. 

"Ah! Cacoethes! I pity, but do not blame you, " 
said the traveller. 

He left the creature, and presently came to an- 
other which sang a squeaky treble song. It wan- 
dered round in a ring under a grove of stunted 
trees, and the traveller noticed that it never went 
out of that grove. 

"Is it really necessary," he said, "for you to ex- 
press yourself thus?" 

And as he spoke showers of tiny hard nuts came 
down on the little creature, who ate them greedily. 
The traveller opened one; it was extremely small 
and tasted of dry rot. 

"Why, at all events," he said, "need you stay 
under these trees? the nuts are not good here. " 

But for answer the little creature ran round and 
round, and round and round. 

"I suppose," said the traveller, "small bad nuts 
213 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

are better than no bread; if you went out of this 
grove you would starve? " 

The purbUnd httle creature shrieked. The 
traveller took the sound for affirmation, and passed 
on. He came to a third little creature who, under 
a tall tree, was singing very loudly indeed, while 
all around was a great silence, broken only by 
sounds like the snuffling of small noses. The 
creature stopped singing as the traveller came up, 
and at once a storm of huge nuts came down; the 
traveller found them sweetish and very oily. 

"Why," he said to the creature, "did you sing 
so loud? You cannot eat all these nuts. You 
really do sing louder than seems necessary; come, 
answer me!" 

But the purblind little creature began to sing 
again at the top of its voice, and the noise of the 
snuffling of small noses became so great that the 
traveller hastened away. He passed many other 
purblind little creatures in the twilight of this 
forest, till at last he came to one that looked even 
blinder than the rest, but whose song was sweet and 
low and clear, breaking a perfect stillness; and the 
traveller sat down to listen. For a long time he 
listened to that song without noticing that not a 
nut was falling. But suddenly he heard a faint 
rustle and three little oval nuts lay on the ground. 

214 



WANTED— SCHOOLING 

The traveller cracked one of them. It was of 
delicate flavour. He looked at the little creature 
standing with its face raised, and said : 

" Tell me, little blind creature, whose song is so 
charming, where did you learn to sing?" 

The little creature turned its head a trifle to one 
side as though hstening for the fall of nuts. 

"Ah, indeed!" said the traveller: "You, whose 
voice is so clear, is this all you get to eat?" 

The little bhnd creature smiled. . . . 

It is a twilight forest in which we writers of fic- 
tion wander, and once in a way, though all this 
has been said before, we may as well remind our- 
selves and others why the light is so dim; why 
there is so much bad and false fiction ; why the de- 
mand for it is so great. Living in a world where 
demand creates supply, we writers of fiction furnish 
the exception to this rule. For, consider how, as 
a class, we come into existence. Unlike the fol- 
lowers of any other occupation, nothing whatever 
compels any one of us to serve an apprenticeship. 
We go to no school, have to pass no examination, 
attain no standard, receive no diploma. We need 
not study that which should be studied; we are at 
liberty to flood our minds with all that should not 
be studied. Like mushrooms, in a single night we 
spring up — a pen in our hands, very little in our 
brains, and who-knows-what in our hearts! 

215 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

Few of us sit down in cold blood to write our 
first stories ; we have something in us that we feel 
we must express. This is the beginning of the 
vicious circle. Our first books often have some- 
thing in them. We are sincere in trying to express 
that something. It is true we cannot express it, 
not having learnt how, but its ghost haunts the 
pages — the ghost of real experience and real life — 
just enough to attract the untrained intelligence, 
just enough to make a generous Press remark: 
" This shows promise. " We have tasted blood, we 
pant for more. Those of us who had a carking 
occupation hasten to throw it aside, those who had 
no occupation have now found one; some few of 
us keep both the old occupation and the new. 
Whichever of these courses we pursue, the hurry 
with which we pursue it undoes us. For, often we 
have only that one book in us, which we did not 
know how to write, and having expressed that 
which we have felt, we are driven in our second, our 
third, our fourth, to warm up variations, like those 
dressed remains of last night's dinner which are 
served for lunch; or to spin from our usually com- 
monplace imaginations thin extravagances which 
those who do not try to think for themselves are 
ever ready to accept as full of inspiration and 
vitality. Anything for a book, we say — anything 
for a book! 

216 



WANTED— SCHOOLING 

From time immemorial we have acted in this 
immoral manner, till we have accustomed the 
Press and Public to expect it. From time imme- 
morial we have allowed ourselves to be driven 
by those powerful drivers, Bread, and Praise, and 
cared little for the quality of either. Sensibly, 
or insensibly, we tune our songs to earn the nuts 
of our twilight forest. We tune them, not to the 
key of: "Is it good?" but to the key of : "Will it 
pay?" and at each tuning the nuts fall fast! It is 
all so natural. How can we help it, seeing that 
we are undisciplined and standardless, seeing 
that we started without the backbone that school- 
ing gives? Here and there among us is a genius, 
here and there a man of exceptional stability who 
trains himself in spite of all the forces working for 
his destruction. But those who do not publish 
until they can express, and do not express until 
they have something worth expressing, are so rare 
that they can be counted on the fingers of three or 
perhaps four hands; mercifully, we all — or nearly 
all — believe ourselves of that company. 

It is the fashion to say that the public will have 
what it wants. Certainly the PubHc will have what 
it wants if what it wants is given to the Public. 
If what it now wants were suddenly withdrawn, 
the Public, the big Public, would by an obvious 

217 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

natural law take the lowest of what remained; 
if that again were withdrawn, it would take the 
next lowest, until by degrees it took a relatively- 
good article. The Public, the big Public, is a 
mechanical and helpless consumer at the mercy of 
what is supplied to it, and this must ever be so. 
The Public then is not to blame for the supply of 
bad, false fiction. The Press is not to blame, for 
the Press, like the Public, must take what is set 
before it; their Critics, for the most part, like our- 
selves have been to no school, passed no test of 
fitness, received no certificate; they cannot lead 
us, it is we who lead them, for without the Critics 
we could live but without us the Critics would die. 
We cannot, therefore, blame the Press. Nor is 
the Pubhsher to blame; for the Publisher will pub- 
lish what is set before him. It is true that if he 
published no books on commission he would de- 
serve the praise of the State, but it is quite unrea- 
sonable for us to expect him to deserve the praise 
of the State, since it is we who supply him with 
these books and incite him to publish them. We 
cannot, therefore, lay the blame on the Pubhsher. 
We must lay the blame where it clearly should 
be laid, on ourselves. We ourselves create the 
demand for bad and false fiction. Very many of 
us have private means; for such there is no excuse. 

218 



WANTED— SCHOOLING 

Very many of us have none; for such, once started 
on this journey of fiction, there is much, often 
tragic, excuse — the less reason then for not having 
trained ourselves before setting out on our way. 
There is no getting out of it; the fault is ours. If 
we will not put ourselves to school when we are 
young; if we must rush into print before we can 
spell; if we will not repress our natural desires and 
walk before we run; if we will not learn at least 
what not to do — we shall go on wandering through 
the forest, singing our foolish songs. 

And since we cannot train ourselves except by 
writing, let us write, and burn what we write; then 
shall we soon stop writing, or produce what we 
need not burn ! 

For, as things are now, without compass, with- 
out map, we set out into the twilight forest of fic- 
tion; without path, without track — and we never 
emerge. 

Yes, with the French writer, we must say: 

"Et nous jongleurs inutiles, frivoles joueurs de 
luth!" . . . 

1906. 



219 



REFLECTIONS ON OUR DISLIKE OF 
THINGS AS THEY ARE 

YES! Why is this the chief characteristic of 
our art? What secret instincts are respon- 
sible for this inveterate distaste? But, first, is it 
true that we have it? 

To stand still and look at a thing for the joy of 
looking, without reference to any material ad- 
vantage, and personal benefit, either to ourselves 
or our neighbours, just simply to indulge our curi- 
osity! Is that a British habit? Ithhiknot. 

If, on some November afternoon, we walk into 
Kensington Gardens, where they join the Park on 
the Bayswater side, and, crossing in front of the 
ornamental fountain, glance at the semicircular 
seat let into a dismal little Temple of the Sun, 
we shall see a half-moon of apathetic figures. 
There, enjoying a moment of lugubrious idleness, 
may be sitting an old countrywoman with steady 
eyes in a lean, dusty-black dress and an old poke- 
bonnet; by her side, some gin-faced creature of 
the town, all blousy and draggled; a hollow-eyed 
foreigner, far gone in consumption; a bronzed 

220 



REFLECTIONS 

young navvy, asleep, with his muddy boots jut- 
ting straight out; a bearded, dreary being, chin on 
chest; and more consumptives, and more vaga- 
bonds, and more people dead-tired, speechless, 
and staring before them from that crescent-shaped 
haven where there is no draught at their backs, 
and the sun occasionally shines. And as we look 
at them, according to the state of our temper, we 
think: Poor creatures, I wish I could do something 
for them! or: Revolting! They oughtn't to allow 
it! But do we feel any pleasure in just watching 
them; any of that intimate sensation a cat enter- 
tains when its back is being rubbed; are we curi- 
ously enjoying the sight of these people, simply 
as manifestations of life, as objects fashioned by 
the ebb and flow of its tides? Again, I think, not. 
And why? Either, because we have instantly felt 
that we ought to do something; that here is a dan- 
ger in our midst, which one day might affect our 
own security; and at all events, a sight revolt- 
ing to us who came out to look at this remarkably 
fine fountain. Or, because we are too humane! 
Though very possibly that frequent murmur- 
ing of ours: Ah! It's too sad! is but another 
way of putting the words: Stand aside, please, 
you're too depressing! Or, again, is it that we 
avoid the sight of things as they are, avoid the 

221 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

unedifying, because of what may be called "the 
uncreative instinct, " that safeguard and concom- 
itant of a civilisation which demands of us com- 
plete efficiency, practical and thorough employ- 
ment of every second of our time and every inch 
of our space? We know, of course, that out of 
nothing nothing can be made, that to "create" 
anything a man must first receive impressions, and 
that to receive impressions requires an apparatus 
of nerves and feelers, exposed and quivering to 
every vibration round it, an apparatus so entirely 
opposed to our national spirit and traditions that 
the bare thought of it causes us to blush. A ro- 
bust recognition of this, a steadfast resolve not to 
be forced out of the current of strenuous civilisa- 
tion into the sleepy backwater of pure impression- 
ism, makes us distrustful of attempts to foster 
in ourselves that receptivity and subsequent crea- 
tiveness, the microbes of which exist in every man. 
To watch a thing simply because it is a thing, 
entirely without considering how it can affect us, 
and without even seeing at the moment how we 
are to get anything out of it, jars our consciences, 
jars that inner feeling which keeps secure and 
makes harmonious the whole concert of our Uves, 
for we feel it to be a waste of time, dangerous to 
the community, contributing neither to our meat 

222 



REFLECTIONS 

and drink, our clothes and comfort, nor to the 
stabihty and order of our Hves. 

Of these three possible reasons for our dislike 
of things as they are, the first two are perhaps 
contained within the third. But, to whatever 
oar dislike is due, we have it — Oh! we have it! 
With the possible exception of Hogarth in his non- 
preaching pictures, and Constable in his sketches 
of the sky, — I speak of dead men only, — have we 
produced any painter of reality like Manet or 
Millet, any writer like Flaubert or Maupassant, 
like Turgenev, or Tchekov. We are, I think, too 
deeply civilised, so deeply civilised that we have 
come to look on Nature as indecent. The acts 
and emotions of life undraped with ethics seem to 
us anathema. It has long been, and still is, the 
fashion among the intellectuals of the Continent to 
regard us as barbarians in most aesthetic matters. 
Ah! If they only knew how infinitely barbarous 
they seem to us in their naive contempt of our bar- 
barism, and in what we regard as their infantine 
concern with things as they are. How far have we 
not gone past all that — we of the oldest settled 
Western countiy, who have so veneered our lives 
that we no longer know of what wood they are 
made! Whom generations have so soaked with 
the preserve "good form" that we are impervious 

223 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

to the claims and clamour of that ill-bred creature 
— ^lif e ! Who think it either dreadful, or vieux jeu, 
that such things as the crude emotions and the raw 
struggles of Fate should be even mentioned, much 
less presented in terms of art! For whom an 
artist is 'suspect ' if he is not, in his work, a sports- 
man and a gentleman? Who shake a solenan head 
over writers who will treat of sex; and, with the 
remark: "Worst of it is, there's so much truth in 
those fellows!" close the book. 

Ah! well! I suppose we have been too long 
familiar with the unprofitableness of speculation, 
have surrendered too definitely to action — to the 
material side of things, retaining for what relaxa- 
tion our spirits may require, a habit of sentimental 
aspiration, carefully divorced from things as they 
are. We seem to have decided that things are 
not, or, if they are, ought not to be — and what is 
the good of thinking of things like that? In fact, 
our national ideal has become the Will to Health, 
to Material Efficiency, and to it we have sacrificed 
the Will to Sensibility. It is a point of view. And 
yet — to the philosophy that craves Perfection, to 
the spirit that desires the golden mean, and hank- 
ers for the serene and balanced seat in the centre 
of the see-saw, it seems a little pitiful, and con- 
stricted; a confession of defeat, a hedging and 

224 



REFLECTIONS 

limitation of the soul. Need we put up with this, 
must we for ever turn our eyes away from things 
as they are, stifle our imaginations and our sensi- 
bilities, for fear that they should become our mas- 
ters, and destroy our sanity? This is the eternal 
question that confronts the artist and the thinker. 
Because of the inevitable decline after full flower- 
ing-point is reached, the inevitable fading of the 
fire that follows the full flame and glow, are we 
to recoil from striving to reach the perfect and 
harmonious climacteric? Better to have loved 
and lost, I think, than never to have loved at all; 
better to reach out and grasp the fullest expres- 
sion of the individual and the national soul, than 
to keep for ever under the shelter of the wall. I 
would even think it possible to be sensitive with- 
out neurasthenia, to be sympathetic without in- 
sanity, to be alive to all the winds that blow with- 
out getting influenza. God forbid that our Letters 
and our Arts should decade into Beardsleyism; 
but between that and their present "health" 
there lies full flowering-point, not yet, by a long 
way, reached. 

To flower like that, I suspect, we must see things 
just a little more — as they are! 

1905-1912. 

225 



THE WINDLESTRAW 

A CERTAIN writer, returning one afternoon 
from rehearsal of his play, sat down in the 
hall of the hotel where he was staying. "No," 
he reflected, "this play of mine will not please the 
Public; it is gloomy, almost terrible. This very 
day I read these words in my morning paper: 
'No artist can afford to despise his Public, for, 
whether he confesses it or not, the artist exists to 
give the Public what it wants.' I have, then, not 
only done what I cannot afford to do, but I have 
been false to the reason of my existence." 

The hall was full of people, for it was the hour 
of tea; and looking round him, the writer thought : 
"And this is the Public — the Public that my play 
is destined not to please!" And for several min- 
utes he looked at them as if he had been hypno- 
tised. Presently, between two tables he noticed 
a waiter standing, lost in his thoughts. The mask 
of the man's professional civiHty had come awry, 
and the expression of his face and figure was curi- 
ously remote from the faces and forms of those 
from whom he had been taking orders; he seemed 

226 



THE WINDLESTRAW 

like a bird discovered in its own haunts, all un- 
conscious as yet of human eyes. And the writer 
thought: "But if those people at the tables are 
the Pubhc, what is that waiter? How if I was 
mistaken, and not they, but he were the real Pub- 
lic?" And testing this thought, his mind began 
at once to range over all the people he had lately 
seen. He thought of the Founder's Day dinner 
of a great School, which he had attended the night 
before. "No," he mused, "I see very little re- 
semblance between the men at that dinner and 
the men in this hall; still less between them and 
the waiter. How if they were the real Public, 
and neither the waiter, nor these people here!" 
But no sooner had he made this reflection, than 
he bethought him of a gathering of workers whom 
he had watched two days ago. "Again," he 
mused, "I do not recollect any resemblance at all 
between those workers and the men at the dinner, 
and certainly they are not like any one here. What 
if those workers are the real Public, not the men 
at the dinner, nor the waiter, nor the people in 
this hall!" And thereupon his mind flew off 
again, and this time rested on the figures of his 
own immediate circle of friends. They seemed 
very different from the four real Publics whom 
he had as yet discovered. "Yes," he considered, 

227 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

"when I come to think of it, my associates — 
painterS; and writerS; and critics, and all that kind 
of person — do not seem to have anything to speak 
of in common with any of these people. Perhaps 
my own associates, then, are the real Public, and 
not these others!" Perceiving that this would be 
the fifth real Public, he felt discouraged. But 
presently he began to think: "The past is the 
past and cannot be undone, and with this play of 
mine I shall not please the Public; but there is 
always the future! Now, I do not wish to do 
what the artist cannot afford to do, I earnestly 
desire to be true to the reason of my existence; 
and since the reason of that existence is to give 
the Public what it wants, it is really vital to dis- 
cover who and what the Public is!" And he be- 
gan to look very closely at the faces around him, 
hoping to find out from types what he had failed 
to ascertain from classes. Two men were sitting 
near, one on each side of a woman. The first, 
who was all crumpled in his arm-chair, had curly 
lips and wrinkles round the eyes, cheeks at once 
rather fat and rather shadowy, and a dimple in 
his chin. It seemed certain that he was hu- 
mourous, and kind, sympathetic, rather diffident, 
speculative, moderately intelligent, with the rudi- 
ments perhaps of an imagination. And he looked 

228 



THE WINDLESTRAW 

at the second man, who was sitting very upright, 
as if he had a particularly fine backbone, of which 
he was not a little proud. He was extremely big 
and handsome, with pronounced and regular nose 
and chin, firm, well-cut lips beneath a smooth 
moustache, direct and rather insolent eyes, a some- 
what receding forehead, and an air of mastery 
over all around. It was obvious that he possessed 
a complete knowledge of his own mind, some 
brutahty, much practical intelligence, great reso- 
lution, no imagination, and plenty of conceit. 
And he looked at the woman. She was pretty, 
but her face was vapid, and seemed to have no 
character at all. And from one to the other he 
looked, and the more he looked the less resem- 
blance he saw between them, till the objects of his 
scrutiny grew restive. Then, ceasing to examine 
them, an idea came to him. "No! The Pubhc 
is not this or that class, this or that type; the 
Public is an hypothetical average human being, 
endowed with average human quaUties — a dis- 
tillation, in fact, of all the people in this hall, 
the people in the street outside, the people of this 
countiy everywhere. " And for a moment he was 
pleased; but soon he began again to feel uneas}^ 
"Since," he reflected, "it is necessary for me 
to supply this hypothetical average human being 

229 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

with what he wants, I shall have to find out how 
to distil him from all the ingredients around me. 
Now how am I to do that? It will certainly take 
me more than all my life to collect and boil the 
souls of all of them, which is necessary if I am to 
extract the genuine article, and I should then 
apparently have no time left to supply the pre- 
cipitated spirit, when I had obtained it, with what 
it wanted! Yet this hypothetical average human 
being must be found, or I must stay for ever 
haunted by the thought that I am not supplying 
him with what he wants!" And the writer be- 
came more and more discouraged, for to arrogate 
to himself knowledge of all the heights and depths, 
and even of all the virtues and vices, tastes and 
dislikes of all the people of the country, without 
having first obtained it, seemed to him to savour 
of insolence. And still more did it appear im- 
pertinent, having taken this mass of knowledge 
which he had not got, to extract from it a golden- 
mean man, in order to supply him with what he 
wanted. And yet this was what every artist did 
who justified his existence — or it would not have 
been so stated in a newspaper. And he gazed up 
at the lofty ceiling, as if he might perchance see 
the Public flying up there in the faint bluish 
mist of smoke. And suddenly he thought: "Sup- 

230 



THE WINDLESTRAW 

pose, by some miracle, my golden-mean bird came 
flying to me with its beak open for the food with 
which it is my duty to supply it — would it after 
all be such a very strange-looking creature; would 
it not be extremely Hke my normal self? Am I 
not, in fact, myself the Public? For, without the 
strongest and most reprehensible conceit, can I 
claim for my normal self a single attribute or 
quality not possessed by an hypothetical average 
human being? Yes, I am myself the Public; or 
at all events all that my consciousness can ever 
know of it for certain. " And he began to consider 
deeply. For sitting there in cold blood, with his 
nerves at rest, and his brain and senses normal, 
the play he had written did seem to him to put an 
unnecessary strain upon the faculties. "Ah!" he 
thought, "in future I must take good care never 
to write anything except in cold blood, with my 
nerves well clothed, and my brain and senses 
quiet. I ought only to write when I feel as normal 
as I do now. " And for some minutes he remained 
motionless, looking at his boots. Then there 
crept into his mind an uncomfortable thought. 
"But have I ever written anything without feel- 
ing a little — abnormal, at the time? Have I ever 
even felt inclined to write anything, until my emo- 
tions had been unduly excited, my brain immoder- 

231 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

ately stirred, my senses unusually quickened, or 
my spirit extravagantly roused? Never! Alas, 
never! I am then a miserable renegade, false 
to the whole purpose of my being — nor do I see 
the slightest hope of becoming a better man, a less 
unworthy artist! For I Hterally cannot write 
without the stimulus of some feeling exaggerated 
at the expense of other feelings. What has been 
in the past will be in the future: I shall never be 
taking up my pen when I feel my comfortable and 
normal self — never be satisfying that self which 
is the Public!" And he thought: "I am lost. 
For, to satisfy that normal self, to give the Pubhc 
what it wants, is, I am told, and therefore must be- 
lieve, what all artists exist for. ^Eschylus in his 
'Choephorse' and his 'Prometheus'; Sophocles 
in his 'GEdipus Tyrannus'; Euripides when he 
wrote 'The Trojan Women,' 'Medea,' and 
'Hippolytus'; Shakespeare in his 'Lear'; Goethe 
in his 'Faust'; Ibsen in his 'Ghosts' and his 
'Peer Gynt'; Tolstoy in 'The Powers of Dark- 
ness'; all — all in those great works, must have 
satisfied their most comfortable and normal selves; 
all — all must have given to the average human be- 
ing, to the PubHc, what it wants; for to do that, 
we know, was the reason of their existence, and 
who shall say those noble artists were not true to 

232 



THE WINDLESTRAW 

it? That is surely unthinkable. And yet — and 
yet — we are assured, and, indeed, it is true, that 
there is no real Public in this country for just those 
plays ! Therefore ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, 
Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy, in their 
greatest works did not give the Public what it 
wants, did not satisfy the average human being, 
their more comfortable and normal selves, and as 
artists were not true to the reason of their 
existence. Therefore they were not artists, which 
is unthinkable ; therefore I have not yet found the 
Public!" 

And perceiving that in this impasse his last hope 
of discovery had foundered, the writer let his head 
fall on his chest. 

But even as he did so a gleam of Hght, like a 
faint moonbeam, stole out into the garden of his 
despair. "Is it possible," he thought, "that, 
by a writer, until his play has been performed 
(when, alas! it is too late), 'the Public' is incon- 
ceivable — in fact that for him there is no such 
thing? But if there be no such thing, I cannot 
exist to give it what it wants. What then is 
the reason of my existence? Am I but a windle- 
straw?" And wearied out with his perplexity, he 
fell into a doze. And while he dozed he dreamed 
that he saw the figure of a woman standing in 

233 



CONCERNING LETTERS 

darknesS; from whose face and form came a misty 
refulgence, such as steals out into the dusk from 
white campion flowers along summer hedgerows. 
She was holding her pale hands before her, wide 
apart; with the palms turned down, quivering as 
might doves about to settle; and for all it was so 
dark; her grey eyes were visible — full of light; 
with black rims round the irises. To gaze at those 
eyes was almost painful; for though they were 
beautiful; they seemed to see right through his 
soul; to pass him by, as though on a far discovering 
voyage; and forbidden to rest. 

The dreamer spoke to her: "Who are you, 
standing there in the darkness with those eyes that 
I can hardly bear to look at? Who are you? " 

And the woman answered: "Friend; I am 
your Conscience; I am the Truth as best it may be 
seen by you. I am she whom you exist to serve. " 
With those words she vanished, and the writer 
woke. A boy was standing before him with the 
evening papers. 

To cover his confusion at being caught asleep 
he purchased one and began to read a leading 
article. It commenced with these words: "There 
are certain playwrights taking themselves very 
seriously; might we suggest to them that they are 
in danger of becoming ridiculous. ..." 

234 



THE WINDLESTRAW 

The writer let fall his hand, and the paper flut- 
tered to the ground. "The Pubhc," he thought, 
"I am not able to take seriously, because I cannot 
conceive what it may be; myself, my conscience, 
I am told I must not take seriously, or I become 
ridiculous. Yes, I am indeed lost!" 

And with a feeling of elation, as of a straw blown 
on every wind, he arose. 

1910. 



235 



ABOUT CENSORSHIP 

SINCE; time and agairi; it has been proved, in 
this countiy of free institutions, that the 
great majority of our fellow-countrymen consider 
the only Censorship that now obtains amongst us, 
namely the Censorship of Plays, a bulwark for 
the preservation of their comfort and sensibility 
against the spiritual researches and speculations 
of bolder and too active spirits — it has become 
time to consider whether we should not seriously 
extend a principle, so grateful to the majority, to 
all our institutions. 

For no one can deny that in practice the Censor- 
ship of Drama works with a smooth swiftness — a 
lack of delay and friction unexampled in any pub- 
lic office. No troublesome publicity and tedious 
postponement for the purpose of appeal mar its 
efficiency. It is neither hampered by the Law nor 
by the slow process of popular election. Wel- 
comed by the overwhelming majority of the public ; 
objected to only by such persons as suffer from it, 
and a negligible faction, who, wedded pedantically 
to liberty of the subject, are resentful of summary 

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ABOUT CENSORSHIP 

powers vested in a single person responsible only 
to his own conscience — ^it is amazingly, triumph- 
antly, successful. 

Why, then, in a democratic State, is so valuable 
a protector of the will, the interests, and pleasure 
of the majority not bestowed on other branches of 
the pubUc being? Opponents of the Censorship 
of Plays have been led by the absence of such other 
Censorships to conclude that this Office is an 
archaic survival, persisting into times that have 
outgrown it. They have been known to allege 
that the reason of its survival is simply the fact 
that Dramatic Authors, whose reputation and 
means of livelihood it threatens, have ever been few 
in number and poorly organised — that the reason, 
in short, is the helplessness and weakness of the 
interests concerned. We must all combat with 
force such an aspersion on our Legislature. Can 
it even for a second be supposed that a State which 
gives trial by Jury to the meanest, poorest, most 
helpless of its citizens, and concedes to the great- 
est criminals the right of appeal, could have de- 
barred a body of reputable men from the ordinary 
rights of citizenship for so cynical a reason as that 
their numbers were small, their interests unjoined, 
their protests feeble? Such a supposition were 
intolerable! We do not in this country deprive 

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a class of citizens of their ordinary rights, we do 
not place their produce under the irresponsible 
control of one not amenable to Law, by any sort 
of political accident! That would indeed be to 
laugh at Justice in this Kingdom! That would 
indeed be cynical and unsound! We must never 
admit that there is no basic Justice controlling 
the edifice of our Civic Rights. We do, we must, 
conclude that a just and well-considered principle 
underlies this despotic Institution; for surely, 
else, it would not be suffered to survive for a 
single moment! Pom! Pom! 

If, then, the Censorship of Plays be just, benef- 
icent, and based on a well-considered principle, 
we must rightly inquire what good and logical 
reason there is for the absence of Censorship in 
other departments of the national life. If Censor- 
ship of the Drama be in the real mterests of the 
people, or at all events in what the Censor for the 
time being conceives to be their interest — then 
Censorships of Art, Literature, Religion, Science, 
and Politics are in the interests of the people, un- 
less it can be proved that there exists essential dif- 
ference between the Drama and these other 
branches of the public being. Let us consider 
whether there is any such essential difference. 

It is fact, beyond dispute, that every year num- 
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bers of books appear which strain the average read- 
er's intelHgence and sensibiHties to an unendurable 
extent; books whose speculations are totally un- 
suited to normal thinking powers; books which 
contain views of morality divergent from the cus- 
tomary, and discussions of themes imsuited to the 
young person; books which, in fine, provide the 
greater Public with no pleasure whatsoever, and, 
either by harrowing their feelings or offending 
their good taste, cause them real pain. 

It is true that, precisely as in the case of Plays, 
the Public are protected by a vigilant and critical 
Press from works of this description ; that, further, 
they are protected by the commercial instinct of 
the Libraries, who will not stock an article which 
may offend their customers — ^just as, in the case 
of Plays, the Public are protected by the com- 
mon-sense of theatrical Managers; that, finally, 
they are protected by the Police and the Common 
Law of the land. But despite all these protections, 
it is no uncommon thing for an average citizen to 
purchase one of these disturbing or dubious books. 
Has he, on discovering its true nature, the right 
to call on the bookseller to refund its value? He 
has not. And thus he runs a danger obviated in 
the case of the Drama which has the protection 
of a prudential Censorship. For this reason alone, 

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how much better, then, that there should exist a 
paternal authority (some, no doubt, will call it 
grand-maternal — but sneers must not be con- 
founded with argument) to suppress these books 
before appearance, and safeguard us from the 
danger of buying and possibly reading undesirable 
or painful literature! 

A specious reason, however, is advanced for ex- 
empting Literature from the Censorship accorded 
to Plays. He — it is said — who attends the per- 
formance of a play, attends it in public, where his 
feelings may be harrowed and his taste offended, 
cheek by jowl with boys, or women of all ages; it 
may even chance that he has taken to this enter- 
tainment his wife, or the young persons of his 
household. He — on the other hand — who reads 
a book, reads it in privacy. True; but the wielder 
of this argument has clasped his fingers round a 
two-edged blade. The very fact that the book 
has no mixed audience removes from Literature an 
element which is ever the greatest check on licen- 
tiousness in Drama. No manager of a theatre, — 
a man of the world engaged in the acquisition of 
his Hvelihood, — unless guaranteed by the license 
of the Censor, dare risk the presentment before 
a mixed audience of that which might cause an 
emeute among his clients. It has, indeed, always 

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ABOUT CENSORSHIP 

been observed that the theatrical manager, almost 
without exception, thoughtfully recoils from the 
responsibihty that would be thrust on him by the 
abohtion of the Censorship. The fear of the mixed 
audience is ever suspended above his head. No 
such fear threatens the publisher, who displays 
his wares to one man at a time. And for this 
very reason of the mixed audience, perpetually and 
perversely cited to the contrary by such as have 
no firm grasp of this matter, there is a greater 
necessity for a Censorship on Literature than for 
one on Plays. 

Further, if there were but a Censorship of Litera- 
ture, no matter how dubious the books that were 
allowed to pass, the conscience of no reader need 
ever be troubled. For, that the perfect rest of the 
public conscience is the first result of Censorship, 
is proved to certamty by the protected Drama, 
since many dubious plays are yearly put before 
the play-gomg Public without tending in any way 
to disturb a complacency engendered by the 
security from harm guaranteed by this beneficent, 
if despotic, Institution. Pundits who, to the dis- 
comfort of the populace, foster this exemption of 
LiteratiKe from discipline, cling to the old- 
fashioned notion that ulcers should be encouraged 
to discharge themselves upon the surface, instead 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

of being quietly and decently driven into the 
system and allowed to fester there. 

The remaining plea for exempting Literature 
from Censorship, put forward by unreflecting per- 
sons: That it would require too many Censors 
— besides being unworthy, is, on the face of it, 
erroneous. Special tests have never been thought 
necessary in appointing Examiners of Plays. 
They would, indeed, not only be unnecessary, but 
positively dangerous, seeing that the essential 
function of Censorship is protection of the ordi- 
nary prejudices and forms of thought. There 
would, then, be no difficulty in securing to- 
morrow as many Censors of Literature as might 
be necessary (say twenty or thirty) ; since all that 
would be required of each one of them would be 
that he should secretly exercise, in his uncon- 
trolled discretion, his individual taste. In a word, 
this Free Literature of ours protects advancing 
thought and speculation; and those who believe 
in civic freedom subject only to Common Law, 
and espouse the cause of free literature, are cham- 
pioning a system which is essentially undemocratic, 
essentially inimical to the will of the majority, 
who have certainly no desire for any such things 
as advancing thought and speculation. Such per- 
sons, indeed, merely hold the faith that the People, 

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ABOUT CENSORSHIP 

as a whole, unprotected by the despotic judgments of 
single persons, have enough strength and wisdom to 
know what is and what is not harmful to themselves. 
They put their trust in a Public Press and a Common 
Law, which deriving from the Conscience of the Coun- 
try, is openly administered and within the reach of all. 
How absurd; how inadequate this all is we see 
from the existence of the Censorship on Drama. 

Having observed that there is no reason what- 
ever for the exemption of Literature, let us now 
turn to the case of Art. Every picture hung in a 
gallery, every statue placed on a pedestal, is ex- 
posed to the public stare of a mixed company. 
Why, then, have we no Censorship to protect us 
from the possibility of encountering works that 
bring blushes to the cheek of the young person? 
The reason cannot be that the proprietors of Gal- 
leries are more worthy of trust than the managers 
of Theatres; this would be to make an odious dis- 
tinction which those very Managers who uphold 
the Censorship of Plays would be the first to resent. 
It is true that Societies of artists and the pro- 
prietors of Galleries are subject to the prosecution 
of the Law if they offend against the ordinary- 
standards of public decency; but precisely the 
same liabihty attaches to theatrical managers and 
proprietors of Theatres, in whose case it has been 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

found necessary and beneficial to add the Censor- 
ship. And in this connection let it once more be 
noted how much more easily the ordinary stand- 
ards of public decency can be assessed by a single 
person responsible to no one, than by the clumsy 
(if more open) process of public protest. 

What, then, in the hght of the proved justice 
and efficiency of the Censorship of Drama, is the 
reason for the absence of the Censorship of Art? 
The more closely the matter is regarded, the more 
plain it is, that there is none! At any moment we 
may have to look upon some painting, or con- 
template some statue, as tragic, heart-rending, and 
dubiously deHcate in theme as that censured play 
"The Cenci," by one Shelley; as dangerous to 
prejudice, and suggestive of new thought as the 
censured " Ghosts, " by one Ibsen. Let us protest 
against this peril suspended over our heads, and de- 
mand the immediate appointment of a single person 
not selected for any pretentiously artistic feelings, 
but endowed with summary powers of prohibiting 
the exhibition, in public galleries or places, of such 
works as he shall deem, in his uncontrolled discre- 
tion, unsuited to average intelligence or sensibility. 
Let us demand it in the interest, not only of the 
young person, but of those whole sections of the 
community which cannot be expected to take an 

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ABOUT CENSORSHIP 

interest in Art, and to whom the purpose, specula- 
tions, and achievements of great artists, working 
not only for to-day but for to-morrow, must natu- 
rally be dark riddles. Let us even require that this 
official should be empowered to order the destruc- 
tion of the works which he has deemed unsuited 
to average intelligence and sensibility, lest their 
creators should, by private sale, make a profit out 
of them, such as, in the nature of the case, Dra- 
matic Authors are debarred from making out 
of plays which, having been censured, cannot be 
played for money. Let us ask this with con- 
fidence; for it is not compatible with common jus- 
tice that there should be any favouring of Painter 
over Playwright. They are both artists — let them 
both be measured by the same last! 

But let us now consider the case of Science. It 
will not, indeed cannot, be contended that the in- 
vestigations of scientific men, whether committed 
to writing or to speech, are always suited to the 
taste and capacities of our general public. There 
was, for example, the well-known doctrine of 
Evolution, the teachings of Charles Darwin and 
Alfred Russel Wallace, who gathered up certain 
facts, hitherto but vaguely known, into present- 
ments, irreverent and startling, which, at the time, 
profoundly disturbed every normal mind. Not 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

only did religion; as then accepted, suffer in this 
cataclysm, but our taste and feeling were inex- 
pressibly shocked by the discovery, so emphasised 
by Thomas Henry Huxley, of Man's descent from 
Apes. It was felt, and is felt by many to this day, 
that the advancement of that theory grossly and 
dangerously violated every canon of decency. 
What pain, then, might have been averted, what 
far-reaching consequences and incalculable sub- 
version of primitive faiths checked, if some judi- 
cious Censor of scientific thought had existed in 
those days to demand, in accordance with his 
private estimate of the will and temper of the 
majority, the suppression of the doctrine of Evolu- 
tion. 

Innumerable investigations of scientists on sub- 
jects such as the date of the world's creation, have 
from time to time been summarised and incon- 
siderately sprung on a Public shocked and startled 
by the revelation that facts which they were accus- 
tomed to revere were conspicuously at fault. So, 
too, in the range of medicine, it would be difficult 
to cite any radical discovery (such as the preven- 
tive power of vaccination), whose unchecked 
pubHcation has not violated the prejudices and 
disturbed the immediate comfort of the common 
mind. Had these discoveries been judiciously 

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ABOUT CENSORSHIP 

suppressed, or pared away to suit what a Cen- 
sorship conceived to be the popular palate of the 
time, all this disturbance and discomfort might 
have been avoided. 

It will doubtless be contended (for there are no 
such violent opponents of Censorship as those 
who are threatened with the same) that to com- 
pare a momentous disclosure, such as the doctrine 
of Evolution, to a mere drama, were unprofit- 
able. The answer to this ungenerous contention 
is fortunately plain. Had a judicious Censor- 
ship existed over our scientific matters, such 
as for two hundred years has existed over our 
Drama, scientific discoveries would have been no 
more disturbing and momentous than those which we 
are accustomed to see made on our nicely pruned and 
tutored stage. For not only would the more dan- 
gerous and penetrating scientific truths have been 
carefully destroyed at birth, but scientists, aware 
that the results of investigations offensive to ac- 
cepted notions would be suppressed, would long 
have ceased to waste their time in search of a 
knowledge repugnant to average intelligence, and 
thus foredoomed, and have occupied themselves 
with services more agreeable to the public taste, 
such as the rediscovery of truths already known 
and published. 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

Indissolubly connected with the desirabihty of 
a Censorship of Science, is the need for Rehgious 
Censorship. For in this, assuredly not the least 
important department of the nation's hfe, we are 
witnessing week by week and year by year, what 
in the Hght of the security guaranteed by the Cen- 
sorship of Drama, we are justified in terming an 
alarming spectacle. Thousands of men are li- 
censed to proclaim from their pulpits, Sunday 
after Sunday, their individual beliefs, quite re- 
gardless of the settled convictions of the masses of 
their congregations. It is true, indeed, that the 
vast majority of sermons (hke the vast majority of 
plays) are, and will always be, harmonious with 
the feehngs of the average citizen; for neither 
priest nor playwright have customarily any such 
pecuHar gift of spiritual daring as might render 
them unsafe mentors of their fellows; and there 
is not wanting the deterrent of common-sense to 
keep them in bounds. Yet it can hardly be denied 
that there spring up at times men — ^like John Wes- 
ley or General Booth — of such incurable tempera- 
ment as to be capable of abusing their freedom by 
the promulgation of doctrine or procedure, diver- 
gent from the current traditions of religion. Nor 
must it be forgotten that sermons, like plays, are 
addressed to a mixed audience of families, and that 

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the spiritual teachings of a Hfetime may be de- 
stroyed by ten minutes of uncensured pronounce- 
ment from a pulpit, the while parents are sitting, 
not, as in a theatre vested with the right of protest, 
but dumb and excoriated to the soul, watching 
their children, perhaps of tender age, eagerly drink- 
ing in words at variance with that which they 
themselves have been at such pains to instil. 

If a set of Censors — ^for it would, as in the case 
of Literature, indubitably require more than one 
(perhaps one hundred and eighty, but, for reasons 
already given, there should be no difficulty what- 
ever in procuring them) endowed with the swift 
powers conferred by freedom from the dull tedium 
of responsibihty, and not remarkable for religious 
temperament, were appointed, to whom all ser- 
mons and public addresses on religious subjects 
must be submitted before dehvery, and whose duty 
after perusal should be to excise all portions not 
conformable to their private ideas of what was at 
the moment suitable to the Public's ears, we should 
be far on the road toward that proper preserva- 
tion of the status quo so desirable if the faiths and 
ethical standards of the less exuberantly spiritual 
masses are to be maintained in their full bloom. 
As things now stand, the nation has absolutely 
nothing to safeguard it against religious progress. 

We have seen, then, that Censorship is at least 
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as necessary over Literature, Art, Science, and 
Religion as it is over our Drama. We have now 
to call attention to the crowning need — the want 
of a Censorship in Politics. 

If Censorship be based on justice, if it be proved 
to serve the Public and to be successful in its 
lonely vigil over Drama, it should, and logically 
must he, extended to all parallel cases; it cannot, 
it dare not, stop short at Politics. For, pre- 
cisely in this supreme branch of the public life 
are we most menaced by the rule and license of 
the leading spirit. To appreciate this fact, we 
need only examine the Constitution of the House 
of Commons. Six hundred and seventy persons 
chosen from a population numbering four and 
forty millions, must necessarily, whatever their 
individual defects, be citizens of more than average 
enterprise, resource, and resolution. They are 
elected for a period that may last five years. 
Many of them are ambitious; some uncompromis- 
ing; not a few enthusiastically eager to do some- 
thing for their country; filled with designs and 
aspirations for national or social betterment, with 
which the masses, sunk in the immediate pursuits 
of fife, can in the nature of things have little 
sympathy. And yet we find these men licensed 
to pour forth at pleasure, before mixed audiences, 
checked only by Common Law and Common- 

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ABOUT CENSORSHIP 

Sense political utterances which may have the 
gravest, the most terrific consequences; utterances 
which may at any moment let loose revolution, or 
plunge the country into war; which often, as a 
fact, excite an utter detestation, terror, and mis- 
trust; or shock the most sacred domestic and 
proprietary convictions in the breasts of vast 
majorities of their fellow-countrymen! And we 
incur this appalling risk for the want of a single, 
or at the most, a handful of Censors, invested 
with a simple but limitless discretion to excise or 
to suppress entirely such political utterances as 
may seem to their private judgments calculated 
to cause pain or moral disturbance in the average 
man. The masses, it is true, have their protection 
and remedy against injudicious or inflammatory 
politicians in the Law and the so-called demo- 
cratic process of election; but we have seen that 
theatre audiences have also the protection of the 
Law, and the remedy of boycott, and that in their 
case this protection and this remedy are not 
deemed enough. What, then, shall we say of 
the case of Politics, where the dangers attending 
inflammatory or subversive utterance are greater 
a million fold, and the remedy a thousand times 
less expeditious? 

Our Legislators have laid down Censorship as 
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the basic principle of Justice imderljdng the civic 
rights of dramatists. Then, let "Censorship for 
all" be their motto, and this comitry no longer 
be ridden and destroyed by free Institutions ! Let 
them not only establish forthwith Censorships of 
Literature, Art, Science, and Religion, but also 
place themselves beneath the regimen with which 
they have calmly fettered Dramatic Authors. 
They cannot deem it becoming to their regard for 
justice, to their honour, to their sense of humour, 
to recoil from a restriction which, in a parallel 
case they have imposed on others. It is an old 
and homely saying that good officers never place 
their men in positions they would not themselves 
be willing to fill. And we are not entitled to be- 
lieve that our Legislators, having set Dramatic 
Authors where they have been set, will — now that 
their duty is made plain — for a moment hesitate 
to step down and stand alongside. 

But if by any chance they should recoil, and 
thus make answer: "We are ready at all times to 
submit to the Law and the People's will, and to 
bow to their demands, but we cannot and must not 
be asked to place our calling, our duty, and our 
honour beneath the irresponsible rule of an ar- 
bitrary autocrat, however sympathetic with the 
generality he may chance to be!" Then, we 

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ABOUT CENSORSHIP 

would ask: "Sirs, did you ever hear of that great 
saying: 'Do unto others as ye would they should 
do unto you!'" For it is but fair presumption 
that the Dramatists, whom our Legislators have 
placed in bondage to a despot, are, no less than 
those Legislators, proud of their calHng, conscious 
of their duty, and jealous of their honour. 

1909. 



253 



VAGUE THOUGHTS ON ART 

IT was on a day of rare beauty that I went out 
into the fields to try and gather these few 
thoughts. So golden and sweetly hot it was, that 
they came lazily, and with a flight no more co- 
herent or responsible than the swoop of the very 
swallows; and, as in a play or poem, the result 
is conditioned by the conceiving mood, so I knew 
would be the nature of my diving, dipping, pale- 
throated, fork-tailed words. But, after all — I 
thought, sitting there — I need not take my critical 
pronouncements seriously. I have not the firm 
soul of the critic. It is not my profession to know 
things for certain, and to make others feel that 
certainty. On the contrary, I am often wrong — 
a luxury no critic can afford. And so, invading 
as I was the realm of others, I advanced with a 
light pen, feeHng that none, and least of all my- 
self, need expect me to be right. 

What then — I thought — is Art? For I per- 
ceived that to think about it I must first define it ; 
and I almost stopped thinking at all before the 
fearsome nature of that task. Then slowly in my 
mind gathered this group of words: 

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VAGUE THOUGHTS ON ART 

Art is that imaginative expression of human 
energy, which, through technical concretion of 
feehng and perception, tends to reconcile the in- 
dividual with the universal, by exciting in him 
impersonal emotion. And the greatest Art is 
that which excites the greatest impersonal emo- 
tion in an hypothecated perfect human being. 

Impersonal emotion! And what — I thought — 
do I mean by that? Surely I mean: That is not 
Art, which, while I ajn contemplating it, inspires 
me with any active or directive impulse; that is 
Art, when, for however brief a moment, it re- 
places within me interest in myself by interest in 
itself. For, let me suppose myself in the presence 
of a carved marble bath. If my thoughts be: 
"What could I buy that for?" Impulse of ac- 
quisition; or: "From what quarry did it come?" 
Impulse of inquiry; or: "Which would be the 
right end for my head?" Mixed impulse of 
inquiiy and acquisition — I am at that moment 
insensible to it as a work of Art. But, if I stand 
before it vibrating at sight of its colour and forms, 
if ever so little and for ever so short a time, un- 
haunted by any definite practical thought or im- 
pulse — to that extent and for that moment it has 
stolen me away out of myself and put itself there 
instead; has Imked me to the universal by making 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

me forget the individual in me. And for that 
moment; and only while that moment lasts, it is 
to me a work of Art. The word "impersonal," 
then, is but used in this my definition to signify 
momentary forgetfulness of one's own personality 
and its active wants. 

So Art — I thought — is that which, heard, read, 
or looked on, while producing no directive im- 
pulse, warms one with unconscious vibration. Nor 
can I imagine any means of defining what is the 
greatest Art, without hypothecating a perfect 
human being. But since we shall never see, or 
know if we do see, that desirable creature — dog- 
matism is banished, "Academy" is dead to the dis- 
cussion, deader than even Tolstoy left it after his 
famous treatise "What is Art?" For, having de- 
stroyed all the old Judges and Academies, Tolstoy, 
by saying that the greatest Art was that which 
appealed to the greatest number of living human 
beings, raised up the masses of mankind to be a 
definite new Judge or Academy, as tyrannical and 
narrow as ever were those whom he had destroyed. 

This, at all events — I thought — is as far as I 
dare go in defining what Art is. But let me try to 
make plain to myself what is the essential quality 
that gives to Art the power of exciting this un- 
conscious vibration, this impersonal emotion. It 

256 



VAGUE THOUGHTS ON ART 

has been called Beauty! An awkward word — a 
perpetual begging of the question; too current 
in use, too ambiguous altogether; now too narrow, 
now too wide — a word, in fact, too glib to know at 
all what it means. And how dangerous a word — 
often misleading us into slabbing with extraneous 
floridities what would otherwise, on its own plane, 
be Art ! To be decorative where decoration is not 
suitable, to be lyrical where lyricism is out of place, 
is assuredly to spoil Art, not to achieve it. But 
this essential quality of Aii: has also, and more 
happily, been called Rhythm. And, what is 
Rhythm if not that mysterious harmony between 
part and part, and part and whole, which gives 
what is called life; that exact proportion, the 
mystery of which is best grasped in observmg how 
life leaves an animate creature when the essential 
relation of part to whole has been sufficiently dis- 
turbed. And I agree that this rhythmic relation 
of part to part, and part to whole — in short, 
vitaHty — is the one quality inseparable from a 
work of Art. For nothing which does not seem 
to a man possessed of this rhythmic vitaHty, can 
ever steal him out of himself. 

And having got thus far in my thoughts, I 
paused, watching the swallows; for they seemed to 
me the symbol, in their swift, sure curvetting, all 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

daring and balance and surprise, of the delicate 
poise and motion of Art, that visits no two men 
alike, in a world where no two things of all the 
things there be, are quite the same. 

Yes — I thought — and this Art is the one form 
of human energy in the whole world, which really 
works for union, and destroys the barriers between 
man and man. It is the continual, unconscious 
replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by an- 
other; the real cement of human life; the ever- 
lasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is 
grievous, dompting, grim, about our lives is that 
we are shut up within ourselves, with an itch to 
get outside ourselves. And to be stolen away from 
ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from 
that itching, a minute's profound, and as it were 
secret, enfranchisement. The active amusements 
and relaxations of life can only rest certain of our 
faculties, by indulging others; the whole self is 
never rested save through that unconsciousness 
of self, which comes through rapt contemplation 
of Nature or of Art. 

And suddenly I remembered that some believe 
that Art does not produce unconsciousness of self, 
but rather very vivid self-realisation. 

Ah! but — I thought — that is not the first and 
instant effect of Art; the new impetus is the after 

258 



VAGUE THOUGHTS ON ART 

effect of that momentary replacement of oneself 
by the self of the work before us; it is surely the 
result of that brief span of enlargement, enfran- 
chisement; and rest. 

Yes, Art is the great and universal refreshment. 
For Art is never dogmatic; holds no brief for itself 
— ^you may take it or you may leave it. It does 
not force itself rudely where it is not wanted. It 
is reverent to all tempers, to all points of view. 
But it is wilful — the very wind in the comings and 
goings of its influence, an uncapturable fugitive, 
visiting our hearts at vagrant, sweet moments; 
since we often stand even before the greatest works 
of Art without being able quite to lose ourselves! 
That restful oblivion comes, we never quite know 
when — and it is gone! But when it comes, it is a 
spirit hovering with cool wings, blessing us from 
least to greatest, according to our powers; a 
spirit deathless and varied as human life itself. 

And in what sort of age — I thought — are artists 
living now? Are conditions favourable? Life 
is very multiple; full of "movements," "facts," 
and "news"; with the limelight terribly turned 
on — and all this is adverse to the artist. Yet, 
leisure is abundant; the facilities for study 
great; Liberty is respected — more or less. But, 
there is one great reason why, in this age of 

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ours, Art; it seems, must flourish. For, just as 
cross-breeding in Nature — if it be not too vio- 
lent — often gives an extra vitality to the offspring, 
so does cross-breeding of philosophies make for 
vitality in Art. I cannot help thinking that his- 
torians, looking back from the far future, will re- 
cord this age as the Third Renaissance. We who 
are lost in it, working or looking on, can neither 
tell what we are doing, nor where standing; but 
we cannot help observing, that, just as in the Greek 
Renaissance, worn-out Pagan orthodoxy was pene- 
trated by new philosophy; just as in the Italian 
Renaissance, Pagan philosophy, reasserting itself, 
fertilised again an already too inbred Christian 
creed; so now Orthodoxy fertilised by Science is 
producing a fresh and fuller conception of life — a 
love of Perfection, not for hope of reward, not for 
fear of punishment, but for Perfection's sake. 
Slowly, under our feet, beneath our consciousness, 
is forming that new philosophy, and it is in times 
of new philosophies that Art, itself in essence al- 
ways a discovery, must flourish. Those whose 
sacred suns and moons are ever in the past, tell 
us that our Art is going to the dogs; and it is, in- 
deed, true that we are in confusion I The waters 
are broken, and every nerve and sinew of the artist 
is strained to discover his own safety. It is an age 

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of stir and change, a season of new wine and old 
bottles. Yet, assuredly, in spite of breakages and 
waste, a wine worth the drinking is all the time 
being made. 

I ceased again to think, for the smi had dipped 
low, and the midges were biting me; and the 
sounds of evening had begun, those innumerable 
far-travelling sounds of man and bird and beast — 
so clear and intimate — of remote countrysides at 
sunset. And for long I listened, too vague to 
move my pen. 

New philosophy — a vigorous Art! Are there 
not all the signs of it? In music, sculpture, paint- 
ing; in fiction — and drama; in dancing; in criti- 
cism itself, if criticism be an Art. Yes, we are 
reaching out to a new faith not yet crystallised, 
to a new Art not yet perfected; the forms still to 
find — the flowers still to fashion ! 

And how has it come, this slowly growing faith 
in Perfection for Perfection's sake? Surely like 
this: The Western world awoke one day to find 
that it no longer believed corporately and for cer- 
tain in future life for the individual consciousness. 
It began to feel: I cannot say more than that 
there may be — Death may be the end of man, 
or Death may be nothing. And it began to ask 
itself in this uncertainty: Do I then desire to 

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go on living? Now, since it found that it desired 
to go on living at least as earnestly as ever it 
did before, it began to inquire why. And slowly 
it perceived that there was, inborn within it, a 
passionate instinct of which it had hardly till then 
been conscious — a sacred instinct to perfect itself, 
now, as well as in a possible hereafter; to perfect 
itself because Perfection was desirable, a vision 
to be adored, and striven for; a dream motive 
fastened within ^the Universe; the very essential 
Cause of everything. And it began to see that 
this Perfection, cosmically, was nothing but per- 
fect Equanimity and Harmony; and in human 
relations, nothing but perfect Love and Justice. 
And Perfection began to glow before the eyes of 
the Western world like a new star, whose light 
touched with glamour all things as they came forth 
from Mystery, till to Myster}- they were ready to 
return. 

This — I thought — is surely what the Western 
world has dimly been rediscovering. There has 
crept into our minds once more the feeling that the 
Universe is all of a piece, Equipoise supreme; and 
all things equally wonderful, and mysterious, and 
valuable. We have begun, in fact, to have a 
glimmering of the artist's creed, that nothing may 
we despise or neglect — that everything is worth the 

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doing well; the making fair — that our God, Per- 
fection, is implicit everywhere, and the revelation 
of Him the business of oui' Art. 

And as I jotted down these words I noticed that 
some real stars had crept up into the sky, so grad- 
ually darkening above the pollard Hme-trees; 
cuckoos, who had been calling on the thorn-trees 
all the afternoon, were silent; the swallows no long- 
er flirted past, but a bat was already in career over 
the holly hedge ; and round me the buttercups were 
closing. The whole form and feeling of the world 
had changed, so that I seemed to have before me a 
new picture hanging. 

Ah! I thought — Art must indeed be priest of 
this new faith in Perfection, whose motto is : " Har- 
mony, Proportion, Balance." For by Art alone 
can true harmony in human affairs be fostered, 
true Proportion revealed, and true Equipoise 
preserved. Is not the training of an artist a train- 
ing in the due relation of one thing with another, 
and in the faculty of expressing that relation 
clearly; and, even more, a training in the faculty 
of disengaging from self the veiy essence of self 
— and passing that essence into other selves by so 
delicate means that none shall see how it is done, 
yet be insensibly unified? Is not the artist, of all 
men, foe and nuUifier of partisanship and parochial- 

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ism, of distortions and extravagance, >^the dis- 
coverer of that jack-o'-lantern — ^Truth; for, if 
Truth be not Spiritual Proportion I know not what 
it is. Truth — it seems to me — is no absolute 
thing, but always relative, the essential symmetry 
in the varying relationships of life; and the most 
perfect truth is but the concrete expression of the 
most penetrating vision. Life seen throughout as 
a countless show of the finest works of Art; Life 
shaped, and purged of the irrelevant, the gross, 
and the extravagant; Life, as it were, spiritually 
selected — that is Truth; a thing as multiple, and 
changing, as subtle, and strange, as Life itself, 
and as little to be bound by dogma. Truth ad- 
mits but the one rule: No deficiency, and no ex- 
cess! Disobedient to that rule — nothing attains 
full vitality. And secretly fettered by that rule is 
Art, whose business is the creation of vital things. 
That 2esthete, to be sure, was right, when he 
said : " Itls Style that makes one believe in a thing ; 
nothing but Style. " For, what is Style in its true 
and broadest sense save fidehty to idea and mood, 
and perfect balance in the clothing of them? And 
I thought: Can one believe in the decadence of 
Art in an age which, however unconsciously as yet, 
is beginning to worship that which Art worships — 
Perfection— Style? 

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The faults of our Arts to-day are the faults of 
zeal and of adventure, the faults and crudities of 
pioneers, the errors and mishaps of the explorer. 
They must pass through many fevers, and many 
times lose their way; but at all events they shall 
not go dyuig in their beds, and be buried at Kensal 
Green. And, here and there, amid the disasters and 
wreckage of their voyages of discovery, they will 
find something new, some fresh way of embellish- 
ing life, or of revealing the heart of things. That 
characteristic of to-day's Art — the striving of each 
branch of Art to burst its own boundaries — which 
to many spells destruction, is surely of happy 
omen. The novel straining to become the play, 
the play the novel, both trying to paint; music 
striving to become story; poetry gasping to be 
music; painting panting to be philosophy; forms, 
canons, rules, all melting in the pot; stagnation 
broken up! In all this havoc there is much to 
shock and jar even the most eager and adventu- 
rous. We cannot stand these new-fangled fellows ! 
They have no form! They rush in where angels 
fear to tread. They have lost all the good of the 
old, and given us nothing in its place ! And yet — 
only out of stir and change is born new salvation. 
To deny that is to deny belief in man, to turn our 
backs on courage! It is well, indeed, that some 

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should live in closed studies with the paintings and 
the books of yesterday — such devoted students 
serve Art in their own way. But the fresh-air 
world will ever want new forms. We shall not 
get them without faith enough to risk the old! 
The good will Hve, the bad will die; and to-mor- 
row only can tell us which is which! 

Yes — I thought — we naturally take a too im- 
patient view of the Art of our own time, since we 
can neither see the ends toward which it is almost 
blindly groping, nor the few perfected creations 
that will be left standing amidst the rubble of 
abortive effort. An age must always decry it- 
self and extol its forbears. The unwritten his- 
tory of every Art will show us that. Consider the 
novel — ^that most recent form of Art ! Did not the 
age which followed Fielding lament the treachery 
of authors to the Picaresque tradition, complain- 
ing that they were not as Fielding and Smollett 
were? Be sure they did. Very slowly and in 
spite of opposition did the novel attain in this 
country the fulness of that biographical form 
achieved under Thackeray. Very slowly, and in 
face of condemnation, it has been losing that form 
in favour of a greater vividness which places be- 
fore the reader's brain, not historical statements, 
as it were, of motives and of facts, but word-paint- 

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ings of things and persons, so chosen and arranged 
that the reader may see, as if at first hand, the 
spirit of Life at work before him. The new novel 
has as many bemoaners as the old novel had when 
it was new. It is no question of better or worse, 
but of differing forms — of change dictated by 
gradual suitability to the changing conditions of 
our social life, and to the ever fresh discoveries of 
craftsmen, in the intoxication of which, old and 
equally worthy craftsmanship is — by the way — too 
often for the moment mislaid. The vested interests 
of life favour the line of least resistance — disliking 
and revolting against disturbance; but one must 
always remember that a spurious glamour is in- 
clined to gather around what is new. And, be- 
cause of these two deflecting factors, those who 
break through old forms must well expect to be 
dead before the new forms they have imconsciously 
created have found their true level, high or low, 
in the world of Art. When a thing is new — how 
shall it be judged? In the fluster of meeting 
novelty, we have even seen coherence attempting 
to bind together two personalities so fundamentally 
opposed as those of Ibsen and Bernard Shaw — 
dramatists with hardly a quality in common; no 
identity of tradition, or belief; not the faintest 
resemblance in methods of construction or tech- 

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nique. Yet contemporary estimate talks of them 
often in the same breath. They are new! It is 
enough. And others, as utterly unlike them both. 
They too are new. They have as yet no label of 
their own — then put on some one else's! 

And so — I thought — it must always be; for 
Time is essential to the proper placing and esti- 
mate of all Art. And is it not this feeling, that con- 
temporary judgments are apt to turn out a little 
ludicrous, which has converted much criticism of 
late from judgment pronounced into impression 
recorded — recreative statement — a kind, in fact, 
of expression of the critic's self, elicited through 
contemplation of a book, a play, a symphony, a 
picture? For this kind of criticism there has 
even recently been claimed an actual identity 
with creation. ^Esthetic judgment and creative 
power identical! That is a hard saying. For, 
however sympathetic one may feel toward this 
new criticism, however one may recognise that 
the recording of impression has a wider, more 
elastic, and more lasting value than the delivery 
of arbitrary judgment based on rigid laws of taste; 
however one may admit that it approaches the 
creative gift in so far as it demands the qualities 
of receptivity and reproduction — is there not still 
lacking to this "new" critic something of that 

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thirsting spirit of discovery, which precedes the 
creation — hitherto so-called — of anything? Criti- 
cism, taste, aesthetic judgment, by the very nature 
of their task, wait till life has been focussed by the 
artists before they attempt to reproduce the image 
which that imprisoned fragment of life makes on 
the mirror of their minds. But a thing created 
springs from a germ unconsciously implanted by 
the direct impact of unfettered life on the whole 
range of the creator's temperament; and round the 
germ thus engendered, the creative artist — ever 
penetrating, discovering, selecting — ^goes on build- 
ing cell on cell, gathered from a million little fresh 
impacts and visions. And to say that this is also 
exactly what the recreative critic does, is to say 
that the interpretative musician is creator in the 
same sense as is the composer of the music that he 
interprets. If, indeed, these processes be the same 
in kind, they are in degree so far apart that one 
would think the word creative unfortunately used 
of both. . . . 

But this speculation — I thought — is going be- 
yond the bounds of vagueness. Let there be some 
thread of coherence in your thoughts, as there is in 
the progress of this evening, fast fading into night. 
Return to the consideration of the nature and pur- 
poses of Art! And recognize that much of what 

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you have thought will seem on the face of it heresy 
to the school whose doctrine was incarnated by 
Oscar Wilde in that admirable apotheosis of half- 
truths: "The Decay of the Art of Lying." For 
therein he said: "No great artist ever sees things 
as they really are." Yet, that half-truth might 
also be put thus : The seeing of things as they really 
are — the seeing of a proportion veiled from other 
eyes (together with the power of expression), is 
what makes a man an artist. What makes him 
a great artist is a high fervour of spirit, which pro- 
duces a superlative, instead of a comparative, 
clarity of vision. 

Close to my house there is a group of pines with 
gnarled red limbs flanked by beech-trees. And 
there is often a very deep blue sky behind. Gener- 
ally, that is all I see. But, once in a way, in those 
trees against that sky I seem to see all the passion- 
ate life and glow that Titian painted into his pagan 
pictures. I have a vision of mysterious meaning, 
of a mysterious relation between that sky and those 
trees with their gnarled red limbs and Life as I 
know it. And when I have had that vision I al- 
ways feel, this is reality, and all those other times, 
when I have no such vision, simple unreality. If I 
were a painter, it is for such fervent vision I should 
wait, before moving brush. This, so intimate, 

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inner \dsion of reality, indeed, seems in duller 
moments wellnigh grotesque; and hence that other 
glib half-truth: "Art is greater than Life itself." 
Art is, indeed, greater than Life in the sense that 
the power of Art is the disengagement from Life 
of its real spirit and significance. But in any other 
sense, to say that Art is greater than Life from 
which it emerges, and into which it must remerge, 
can but suspend the artist over Life, with his feet 
in the air and his head in the clouds — Prig mas- 
querading as Demi-god. "Nature is no great 
Mother who has borne us. She is our creation. 
It is in our brain that she quickens to life. " Such 
is the highest hyperbole of the aesthetic creed. 
But what is creative instinct, if not an incessant 
living sympathy with Nature, a constant craving 
like that of Nature's own, to fashion something 
new out of all that comes within the grasp of those 
faculties with which Nature has endowed us? The 
qualities of vision, of fancy, and of imaginative 
power, are no more divorced from Nature, than 
are the qualities of common-sense and courage. 
They are rarer, that is all. But in truth, no one 
holds such views. Not even those who utter 
them. They are the rhetoric, the over-statement 
of half-truths, by such as wish to condemn what 
they call "Realism," without being tempera- 

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mentally capable of understanding what "Real- 
ism" really is. 

And what — I thought — is Realism? What is 
the meaning of that word so wildly used? Is it 
descriptive of technique, or descriptive of the 
spirit of the artist; or both, or neither? Was 
Turgenev a realist? No greater poet ever wrote 
in prose, nor any one who more closely brought 
the actual shapes of men and things before us. 
No more fervent idealists than Ibsen and Tolstoy 
ever lived; and none more careful to make their 
people real. Were they realists? No more deeply 
fantastic writer can I conceive than Dostoievsky, 
nor any who has described actual situations more 
vividly. Was he a realist? The late Stephen 
Crane was called a realist. Than whom no more 
impressionistic writer ever painted with words. 
What then is the heart of this term still often used 
as an expression almost of abuse? To me, at all 
events — I thought — the words realism, realistic, 
have no longer reference to technique, for which 
the words naturalism, naturalistic, serve far better. 
Nor have they to do with the question of imagina- 
tive power — as much demanded by realism as by 
romanticism. For me, a realist is by no means 
tied to naturalistic technique — he may be poetic, 
idealistic, fantastic, impressionistic, anything but 

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— romantic; that, in so far as he is a reaUst, he 
cannot be. The word, in fact, characterises that 
artist whose temperamental preoccupation is with 
revelation of the actual inter-relating spirit of life, 
character, and thought, with a view to enlighten 
himself and others; as distinguished from that 
artist — whom I call romantic — whose tempera- 
mental purpose is invention of tale or design with 
a view to delight himself and others. It is a ques- 
tion of temperamental antecedent motive in the 
artist, and nothing more. 

Realist — Romanticist ! Enlightenment — De- 
light! That is the true apposition. To make 
a revelation — to tell a fairy-tale! And either of 
these artists may use what form he likes — natural- 
istic, fantastic, poetic, impressionistic. For it is 
not by the form, but by the purpose and mood of 
his art that he shall be known, as one or as the 
other. Realists indeed — including the half of 
Shakespeare that was realist — not being primarily 
concerned to amuse their audience, are still com- 
paratively unpopular in a world made up for the 
greater part of men of action, who instinctively re- 
ject all art that does not distract them without 
causing them to think. For thought makes 
demands on an energy already in full use; thought 
causes introspection ; and introspection causes dis- 

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comfort, and disturbs the grooves of action. To 
say that the object of the reaHst is to enhghten 
rather than to deUght, is not to say that in his 
art the reahst is not amusing himself as much as 
ever is the teller of a fairy-tale, though, he does not 
deliberately start out to do so ; he is amusing, too, 
a large part of mankind. For, admitted that the 
object, and the test of Art, is always the awakening 
of vibration, of impersonal emotion, it is still 
usually forgotten that men fall, roughly speaking, 
into two flocks: Those whose intelligence is un- 
inquiring in the face of Art, and does not demand 
to be appeased before their emotions can be 
stirred; and those who, having a speculative bent 
of mind, must first be satisfied by an enlightening 
quality in a work of Art, before that work of Art 
can awaken in them feeling. The audience of the 
realist is drawn from this latter type of man; the 
much larger audience of the romantic artist from 
the former; together with, in both cases, those 
fastidious few for whom all Art is style and only 
style, and who welcome either kind, so long as it 
is good enough. 

To me, then — I thought — this division into 
Realism and Romance, so understood, is the main 
cleavage in all the Arts; but it is hard to find pure 
examples of either kind. For even the most de- 

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termined realist has. more than a streak in him of 
the romanticist, and the most resolute romanticist 
finds it impossible at times to be quite unreal. 
Guido Reni, Watteau, Leighton — were they not 
perhaps somewhat pure romanticists; Rembrandt, 
Hogarth, Manet — mainly reahsts; Botticelli, 
Titian, Raphael, a blend. Dumas p^re, and Scott, 
surely romantic; Flaubert and Tolstoy as surely 
reahsts; Dickens and Cervantes, blended. Keats 
and Swinburne — romantic; Browning and Whit- 
man — realistic; Shakespeare and Goethe, both. 
The Greek dramatists — reahsts. The Arabian 
Nights and Malory — romantic. The Iliad, the 
Odyssey, and the Old Testament, both realism 
and romance. And if in the vagueness of my 
thoughts I were to seek for illustration less general 
and vague to show the essence of this tempera- 
mental cleavage in all Art, I would take the two 
novelists Turgenev and Stevenson. For Tur- 
genev expressed himself in stories that must be 
called romances, and Stevenson employed almost 
always a naturalistic technique. Yet no one would 
ever call Turgenev a romanticist, or Stevenson a 
reahst. The spirit of the first brooded over life, 
found in it a perpetual voyage of spiritual adven- 
ture, was set on discovering and making clear to 
himself and all, the varying traits and emotions 

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of human character — the varying moods of Nature ; 
and though he couched all this discovery in caskets 
of engaging story, it was always clear as day what 
mood it was that drove him to dip pen in ink. The 
spirit of the second, I think, almost dreaded to dis- 
cover; he felt life, I believe, too keenly to want to 
probe into it; he spun his gossamer to lure himself 
and all away from life. That was his driving 
mood; but the craftsman in him, longing to be 
clear and poignant, made him more natural, more 
actual than most realists. 

So, how thin often is the hedge ! And how poor 
a business the partisan abuse of either kind of art 
in a world where each sort of mind has full right to 
its own due expression, and grumbling lawful 
only when due expression is not attained. One 
may not care for a Rembrandt portrait of a plain 
old woman; a graceful Watteau decoration may 
leave another cold — but foolish will he be who 
denies that both are faithful to their conceiving 
moods, and so proportioned part to part, and part 
to whole, as to have, each in its own way, that in- 
herent rhythm or vitality which is the hall-mark 
of Art. He is but a poor philosopher who holds a 
view so narrow as to exclude forms not to his per- 
sonal taste. No realist can love romantic Art so 
much as he loves his own, but when that Art ful- 

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VAGUE THOUGHTS ON ART 

fils the laws of its peculiar being, if he would be no 
blind partisan, he must admit it. The romanticist 
will never be amused by realism, but let him not 
for that reason be so parochial as to think that 
realism, when it achieves vitahty, is not Art. For 
what is Art but the perfected expression of self in 
contact with the world ; and whether that self be 
of enlightening, or of fairy-telling temperament, is 
of no moment whatsoever. The tossing of abuse 
from realist to romanticist and back is but the 
sword-play of two one-eyed men with their blind 
side turned toward each other. Shall not each 
attempt be judged on its own merits? If found 
not shoddy, faked, or forced, but true to itself, 
true to its conceiving mood, and fair-proportioned 
part to whole, so that it lives — then, realistic or 
romantic, in the name of Fairness let it pass ! Of 
all kinds of human energy. Art is surely the most 
free, the least parochial; and demands of us an 
essential tolerance of all its forms. Shall we waste 
breath and ink in condemnation of artists, be- 
cause their temperaments are not our own? 

But the shapes and colours of the day were now 
all blurred ; eveiy tree and stone entangled in the 
dusk. How different the world seemed from that 
in which I had first sat down, with the swallows 
flirting past. And my mood was different; for 

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CONCERNING LETTERS 

each of those worlds had brought to my heart its 
proper feehng — painted on my eyes the just 
picture. And Night, that was coming, would 
bring me yet another mood that would frame itself 
with consciousness at its own fair moment, and 
hang before me. A quiet owl stole by in the field 
below, and vanished into the heart of a tree. And 
suddenly above the moor-line I saw the large moon 
rising. Cinnamon-coloured, it made all things 
swim, made me uncertain of my thoughts, vague 
with mazy feeling. Shapes seemed but drifts of 
moon-dust, and true reality nothing save a sort of 
still listening to the wind. And for long I sat, 
just watching the moon creep up, and hearing the 
thin, dry rustle of the leaves along the holly hedge. 
And there came to me this thought: What is this 
Universe — that never had beginning and will never 
have an end — but a myriad striving to perfect 
pictures never the same, so blending and fading 
one into another, that all form one great perfected 
picture? And what are we — ripples on the tides 
of a birthless, deathless, equipoised Creative Pur- 
pose — but little works of Art? 

Trymg to record that thought, I noticed that 
my note-book was damp with dew. The cattle 
were lying down. It was too dark to see. 

1911. 

278 

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